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Attentional capture by emotional faces in adolescence
Authors:Jillian Grose-Fifer  Andrea Rodrigues  Steven Hoover  Tina Zottoli
Affiliation:Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, TheCity University of New York, USA;The Graduate Center, Forensic Psychology Doctoral subprogram, TheCity University of New York, USA
Abstract:Poor decision making during adolescence occurs most frequently when situationsare emotionally charged. However, relatively few studies have measured thedevelopment of cognitive control in response to emotional stimuli in thispopulation. This study used both affective (emotional faces) and non-affective(letter) stimuli in two different flanker tasks to assess the ability to ignoretask-irrelevant but distracting information, in 25 adults and 25 adolescents. Onthe non-emotional (letter) flanker task, the presence of incongruent flankingletters increased the number of errors, and also slowed participants’ ability toidentify a central letter. Adolescents committed more errors than adults, butthere were no age-related differences for the reaction time interference effectin the letter condition. Post-hoc testing revealed that age-related differenceson the task were driven by the younger adolescents (11-14 years); adults andolder adolescents (15-17 years) were equally accurate in the letter condition.In contrast, on the emotional face flanker task, not only were adolescents lessaccurate than adults but they were also more distracted by task-irrelevantfearful faces as evidenced by greater reaction time interference effects. Ourfindings suggest that the ability to self-regulate in adolescents, as evidencedby the ability to suppress irrelevant information on a flanker task, is moredifficult when stimuli are affective in nature. The ability to ignore irrelevantflankers appears to mature earlier for non-affective stimuli than for affectivestimuli.
Keywords:adolescence   cognitive control   flanker task   affective   non-affective   risk taking
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