Attentional bias toward fear-related stimuli: An investigation with nonselected children and adults and children with anxiety disorders Allison M. Waters a, * , Ottmar V. Lipp b , Susan H. Spence b a School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Qld. 9726, Australia b School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Australia Received 19 December 2003; revised 14 April 2004 Available online 23 August 2004 Abstract Research investigating anxiety-related attentional bias for emotional information in anx- ious and nonanxious children has been equivocal with regard to whether a bias for fear-related stimuli is unique to anxious children or is common to children in general. Moreover, recent cognitive theories have proposed that an attentional bias for objectively threatening stimuli may be common to all individuals, with this effect enhanced in anxious individuals. The cur- rent study investigated whether an attentional bias toward fear-related pictures could be found in nonselected children (n = 105) and adults (n = 47) and whether a sample of clinically anx- ious children (n = 23) displayed an attentional bias for fear-related pictures over and above that expected for nonselected children. Participants completed a dot–probe task that employed fear-related, neutral, and pleasant pictures. As expected, both adults and children showed a stronger attentional bias toward fear-related pictures than toward pleasant pictures. Consis- tent with some findings in the childhood domain, the extent of the attentional bias toward fear-related pictures did not differ significantly between anxious children and nonselected chil- dren. However, compared with nonselected children, anxious children showed a stronger attentional bias overall toward affective picture stimuli. Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 0022-0965/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2004.06.003 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: a.waters@griffith.edu.au (A.M. Waters). J. Experimental Child Psychology 89 (2004) 320–337 www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp