Editorial: Attention to Threat in Child Anxiety: Gazing Into the Future While Keeping Sight of the Past

Since the 1960s, cognitive theories of anxiety have prioritized attention to threat in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety and its disorders.¹ The development of computer-administered tasks in the 1980s, displaying threatening stimuli on the screen and relying on participants' clicking of keys or mouse buttons to measure reaction time, permitted experimental testing of the hypothesis that individuals with anxiety disorders show biased attention to threat.² Considerable data have since accumulated supporting this hypothesis, including in children and adolescents.^1,3 However, reaction times measured by mouse button clicks are indirect and imprecise measurements of attention.⁴ With the availability of eye-tracking in the last decade, researchers have been able to directly and precisely measure attention. Lisk et al.,⁵ in this issue of the Journal, provide a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies that used eye-tracking to measure attention to threat in children and adolescents.