خشم و توجه انتخابی به تشویق و تنبیه در کودکان

Anger is a negative emotion associated with approach motivation and may influence children’s attention preference. Three experiments examined the effect of anger on the attentional biases accompanying reward versus punishment cues in Chinese 5- and 6-year-olds. Experiment 1 tested children who were prone to report angry feelings in an unfair game. Experiment 2 measured children who were rated by parents and teachers for temperamental anger. Experiment 3 explored children who reported angry feelings in a frustrating attention task with rigged and noncontingent feedback after controlling for temperament anger. Results suggested that both the angry and anger-prone children were faster to engage attention toward the reward cues than toward the punishment cues in the three experiments. Furthermore, the angry children in the frustrating attention task (and those with poor attention focusing by parental report) were slower in disengaging attention away from the reward versus punishment cues (especially after negative feedback). Results support the approach motivation of anger, which can facilitate children’s attention toward the appetitive approach-related information. The findings are discussed in terms of the adaptive and maladaptive function of anger.

Conceptually based on the motivational systems, a Behavioral Activation System (BAS) was proposed in response to rewarding or positive stimuli and a Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) was proposed in response to punishing or negative stimuli (Gray, 1987 and Schneirla, 1959). These motivational systems had been applied to the area of emotion study, emphasizing approach-oriented emotions such as happiness and anger as well as avoidance-oriented emotions such as fear and disgust (Davidson et al., 1990 and Fox, 1991). There is a general consensus that emotion plays a key role in shaping selective attention (Bradley, 2009 and Megill, 2003). Moreover, from an evolutionary perspective, approach and avoidance motivations are particularly relevant for survival (e.g., approaching food, avoiding injury) and, thus, are likely to influence our attention (Kenrick & Shiota, 2008). In light of these accounts, fear, shyness, and anxiety temperament produce an active avoidance motivation in visual attention by prioritizing the processing of aversive and punishment-related information (e.g., Derryberry and Reed, 2002, Eysenck and Calvo, 1992 and Pérez-Edgar and Fox, 2005). For example, based on a modified Posner spatial attention task that used reward and punishment cues to prime attention, Pérez-Edgar and Fox (2005) reported that temperamentally shy children under stress and anxiety preferentially attended to punishing cues, whereas non-shy children attended more to rewarding cues. Unlike fear and anxiety, anger activates an active approach motivation during goal blockage (Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009), and this assertion has been echoed by a growing number of studies based on both behavioral data (e.g., Derryberry and Rothbart, 2001 and He et al., 2012) and psychophysiological data (e.g., Harmon-Jones, 2004). For example, anger/frustration observed during anger-eliciting tasks (i.e., toy removal and toy behind barrier) at 10 months of age was positively related to parental report of approach and pleasure at 7 years of age, whereas fear (typically an avoidance-related emotion), in response to a novel stimulus and a social episode with a stranger, was negatively correlated with approach/positive anticipation (Rothbart, Derryberry, & Hershey, 2000). In our recent study (He et al., 2012), 2- to 5-year-olds who displayed anger expression within a frustrating context (i.e., an attractive toy was removed by the mother) showed more approach behaviors intending to overcome obstacles both during toy removal and during another independent locked box task. In addition, a number of studies have revealed that greater anger experience is associated with higher resting levels of left frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry, which is believed to reflect an approach tendency (Carver and Harmon-Jones, 2009, Harmon-Jones, 2004, Harmon-Jones and Allen, 1998 and Pizzagalli et al., 2005). For instance, anger manipulated under a condition where participants were subjected to insulting comments was positively correlated with relative left frontal activity and aggressive behaviors (Harmon-Jones & Sigelman, 2001). The approach nature of anger is linked to selective attention toward rewarding information. Using an eye tracker, Ford and colleagues found that adults either in an angry state (Ford et al., 2010) or high in trait anger (Ford, Tamir, Gagnon, Taylor, & Brunyé, 2012) gazed longer at rewarding images versus control images. Personality research has suggested that trait anger (expressing outwardly) related positively with the reward responsiveness dimension of BAS (Carver, 2004) and inversely to BIS (Smits & Kuppens, 2005). All of these findings support the notion that people who have a tendency to express anger are sensitive to reward-related stimuli. This association of anger and rewards is functionally adaptive. This is because anger orients an individual toward desirable goals, according to the functional perspective that views anger as an energizer and an organizer of behavior (Campos, Campos, & Barrett, 1989). By this, individuals prone to anger show great optimism in judgment and decision making (Lerner & Keltner, 2001), angry people confer high status and competence (Tiedens, 2001), and angry people believe that they have a high likelihood of being able to rectify the negative situation and, thus, display great goal-directed behaviors to pursue positive goals such as rewards (Lazarus, 1991). Making a similar argument, angry children should be more concerned with identifying desirable objects and have an attentional bias to rewarding stimuli. Such attentional bias may influence which aspects of the environment are selected for processing and, hence, shape how children experience and cope with their social world. As a result, angry children exhibited high persistence during goal blockage (Dennis et al., 2009, He et al., 2012 and Lewis et al., 1992), increased interest and joy after the obstacle removal (Lewis et al., 1992), and enhanced surgency in temperamental report (Derryberry and Rothbart, 2001 and He et al., 2013). However, very few studies have ever focused on such a cognitive mechanism of attentional bias to rewards and punishments in angry children. The current study The goal of the current study was to examine how anger influences children’s selective attention under reward and punishment conditions. Three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 examined selective attention to reward and punishment cues in children who were prone to report anger (vs. happiness or neutrality) in an anger-elicited situation (unfair game) in the laboratory. To explore whether the results of Experiment 1 were influenced by temperamental anger, first, Experiment 2 compared the attention performance in children who were rated by both their mothers and teachers for anger expression over time in familiar surroundings and grouped for high versus low anger proneness and, second, after controlling for temperamental anger and fear, Experiment 3 examined attentional biases as a function of emotional states (e.g., anger vs. fear, happiness, or neutrality) induced in a modified selective attention task with rigged and noncontingent feedback (positive and negative feedback was random regardless of performance). A spatial attention cueing task was used to detect targets either at the same side of the cues (congruent trials that reflect the process of attention engagement toward the cued locations) or at the opposite side of the cues (incongruent trials that reflect the process of attention disengagement from the cued locations to the uncued locations) (Derryberry and Reed, 2008 and Posner, 1978). Performance (accuracies and reaction times [RTs]) with the reward cues (i.e., gaining points) was compared with performance with the punishment cues (i.e., losing points). Children’s motivation was manipulated by the reward versus punishment cues linked to task performance (Engelmann and Pessoa, 2007 and Savine et al., 2010). Specifically, our paradigm focused on a particular type of approach motivation in which one performs approach behaviors (i.e., responding as quickly and accurately as possible) in response to both potentially rewarding and potentially punishing cues. Thus, in the rewarding condition approach motivation was strengthened by both approach response and goals to win points, whereas in the punishment condition there was an approach avoidance conflict by requiring an approach behavior in order to avoid losing points, thereby weakening the approach motivation. We expected that children would replicate the basic behavioral patterns found in previous studies using the traditional selective attention task, including the congruency effect that children’s performance is better in congruent trials than in incongruent trials (e.g., Posner, 1978). The primary hypothesis relevant to anger was that angry children would show a general bias favoring the reward cues that signal a potential gain of points. Specifically, they would be faster to engage attention toward the reward cues than toward the punishment cues in the congruent trials, and they would have difficulty in disengaging attention away from the reward cues relative to the punishment cues in the incongruent trials because of their hypersensitivity to rewards. Experiment 1 Previous research has shown that people feel angry when they think they have been treated unfairly in a goal-blocked situation and the occurrence of the negative event is an appraisal of “other-blame” (Chow et al., 2008, Hubbard, 2001 and Lazarus, 1991). Experiment 1 manipulated such a situation, where children met with the obstacles (i.e., unfair treatment from the competitor) in the pursuit of a desirable goal (i.e., to win a game). Additional details of the procedure are provided below in the Method section. This unfair game has been used previously to study peer rejection and aggression (Hubbard, 2001). Nevertheless, irritable aggression is part of the behavioral facilitation system (Depue & Iacono, 1989), a biobehavioral system similar to BAS (Gray, 1987). Therefore, we used the unfair game as an approach context in this experiment.

Our results using incentive manipulations revealed that the angry children in self-reports after unfair treatment or noncontingent feedback, and the anger-prone children in parents’ and teachers’ temperamental reports, had a tendency to orient attention toward reward stimuli rather than punishment stimuli. Those angry children with poor attention focusing also had difficulty in moving attention away from the rewarding stimuli. These findings shed new light on our understanding of the association between anger and selective attention and suggest that they depend on the approach motivational context and functional perspective. Angry and anger-prone children do not differ from peers in their general ability to allocate attention. Instead, initial biases lead these children to preferentially focus attention on the positive and approach-related information in their environment.