This study set out to establish the novel use of the go/no-go Overlap task for investigating the role of attentional control capacities in the processing of emotional expressions across different age-groups within adolescence: at the onset of adolescence (11-12 year-olds) and toward the end of adolescence (17-18 year-olds). We also looked at how attentional control in the processing of fearful, happy, and neutral expressions relates to individual differences in trait anxiety in these adolescent groups. We were able to show that younger adolescents, but not older adolescents had more difficulties with attention control in the presence of all faces, but particularly in the presence of fearful faces. Moreover, we found that across all groups, adolescents with higher trait anxiety exhibited attentional avoidance of all faces, which facilitated relatively better performance on the primary task. These differences in reaction time emerged in the context of comparable accuracy level in the primary task across age-groups. Our results contribute to our understanding of how attentional control abilities to faces but in particular fearful expressions may mature across adolescence. This may affect learning about the environment and the acquisition of behavioral response patterns in the social world. Anxiety is common and affects many areas of life including social relationships, school/work, and long-term well-being. As most anxiety problems start in adolescence, we need more research investigating how and why some young people develop anxiety and how these causes can be targeted in early-life. Anxiety may arise because of a hyperactive fear system. The fear system is usually activated by danger, but it can also respond to situations that resemble, but are not actually dangerous. Learning to differentiate what is dangerous from what is safe is critical to understanding anxiety. This study investigates whether more anxious adolescents will show greater fear to threat cues (cues that signal a negative outcome) and also to safety cues (cues that are never paired with a negative outcome), to the general context in which a threat cue appears, and to threat cues even though they no longer reliably predict a negative outcome. It is expected that this profile of exaggerated fear will predict anxiety and threat beliefs 6 months later. Studying these questions in adolescence is important given that mental abilities and emotional skills change in this age range, with the potential to shape long-term emotional development.

Participants were recruited from local schools and were asked to complete some questionnaires and experimental tasks on a laptop computer.