Attentional Bias (Article Critique Sample)

Course: 1001PSY Introduction to Psychology 1 Student Name:Student ID: Reference for the article (using APA format): Waters, A. M., Mogg, K., Bradley, B. P., & Pine, D. S. (2008). Attentional bias for emotional faces in children with generalized anxiety disorder. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 47(4), 435-442. Summary of article: The article's objective is to identify how visual representations, particularly facial expressions, can affect children's mental state with General Anxiety Disorder. Individuals living with GAD are way more sensitive to external stimuli than others. Research in psychological sciences is conducted to understand human behavior comprehensively, and delving more into psychological disorders is one of its primary goals. The cognitive theory of anxiety was employed as a lens in understanding the event in this research. It targets to expound how anxiety is ingrained in human intellectual processes such as thinking and understanding. It hypothesized that facial expressions could affect the mindset of individuals suffering from General Anxiety Disorder. Specifically, participants display an attentional bias toward angry faces, but not with happy faces. While normal control/without disorder (CON) children do not show an attentional bias for whichever type of emotional face. Participants are 48 children, ranging from 0 months to 12 years old, 27 males and 21 females. Twenty-three children have anxiety, while the rest of 25 have no anxiety. Ninety-eight percent of children (47) was born in Australia, and 2% (1) was born in South Africa. Supposed I am a participant and a child with General Anxiety Disorder; I am asked to complete the visual probe task followed by the Spence Children Anxiety Scale (SCAS-C) and the Revised Children`s Manifest Anxiety Scale, which were both assisted by experimenters. The visual probe was a task where two side by side pictures of happy and angry expressions are flashed for half a second. After 0.5 seconds, the pictures will disappear, and an asterisk will appear on either side of the spaces which were previously occupied by the photos. I have to hit the button corresponding to the side I remember in which the asterisk appeared. After 80 trials, the researchers will then use the Spence Children Anxiety Scale (SCAS-C) and the Revised Children`s Manifest Anxiety Scale to measure my anxiety level after the task. The article provided exciting points and conclusions. Firstly, the result shows that highly anxious children with GAD displayed an attentional bias toward emotional faces regardless of which type of emotion that the facial expression conve...