Linking attention bias to youth social anxiety and depression: Insights from computational modeling of the affective Posner task.

In youth, anxiety and depression symptomatology are linked to an attention bias toward threat-related stimuli. The affective Posner task was designed to assess attention bias to threat; however, research on its effectiveness in predicting anxiety and depressive symptoms in youth is limited. Here, we applied a drift diffusion model to affective Posner performance to evaluate whether this more fine-graianed approach reveals relations between individual differences in attention bias to threat and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Ninety-one adolescents 9-14 (Mage = 11.80, SD = 1.45; 45 males) years completed the affective Posner task. Adolescents and parents completed surveys assessing anxiety and depression. Results revealed that increased processing efficiency (drift rate) predicted parent-reported social anxiety and depression symptom severity, controlling for other drift diffusion parameters (threshold separation, non-decision time), sex, age, and pubertal status. However, relations differed as a function of pubertal status, such that increased processing efficiency (drift rate) predicted greater parent-reported social anxiety and depression symptom severity for youth of higher pubertal status, and a wider evidence accumulation, or slower deliberation process (threshold separation), predicted greater parent-reported depression symptom severity in youth of lower pubertal status. These findings complement, but also expand upon, behavioral data by uncovering latent cognitive processes that cannot be observed in averaged reaction time or accuracy data alone. Overall, the present study supports future lines of inquiry investigating how different tasks influence drift-diffusion model parameters, and in turn, relate to symptoms of psychopathology across development.