The causal relationship of trait anxiety to positive and negative attentional bias in children: the moderation effect of gender

The information-processing model proposes that people with high trait anxiety tend to allocate cognitive resources to negative information, leading to negative attentional bias which is the vulnerability factor of anxiety. However, there is a dearth of longitudinal studies investigating the moderation effect of gender on the causal relationship of trait anxiety to negative and positive attentional bias in children. The current studies aimed to assess whether trait anxiety at time one predicted negative and positive attentional bias at time two for girls and boys, respectively. The moderation effect of gender on the relationship was also tested. The study found that high trait anxiety predicted high positive attentional bias in boys. High trait anxiety also showed a trend to be a significant predictor of attentional avoidance in girls. Gender significantly moderated the causal relationship of trait anxiety to negative attentional bias. The findings had significant implications for establishing the gender-specific information-processing model for children.