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Social Stress, Affect, and Neural Function 229Anxious individuals respond atypically on a number of cognitive tasks designedto measure aspects of attention, especially when the stimuli comprise emotionallysalient cues. Attention interference tasks, for instance, require study participants toattend to nonemotional stimulus features while simultaneously ignoring emotionalfeatures of the same stimulus. During one such task, the emotional Stroop, individualsare asked to label the colors in which different words are printed. Some of the wordsare neutral in meaning, whereas others carry emotional (typically threatening, instudies of anxiety) connotations. In general, it is more difficult for people to ignorethreatening words (e.g., “death”) than neutral words, and thus they are slower toname the colors of threat-related stimuli (Williams et al., 1996). Adolescents whohave or are at risk for developing anxiety disorders appear to be particularly proneto such interference (Moradi et al., 1999; A. Richards et al., 2000; Schwartz et al.,1996), which suggests that the effects of emotional stimulus features on attentionallocation are magnified in these populations.Studies using tasks that require individuals to orient to specified cues have alsodemonstrated that anxious and nonanxious individuals differ in aspects of attentionalfunctioning. For instance, during visual search tasks that involve scanningfields of stimuli (most of which are emotionally evocative) for isolatednonemotional targets, youth who self-report high levels of anxious symptoms areslower than low-anxious controls to locate target stimuli (Hadwin et al., 2003).Research employing other types of attention orientation tasks with anxious youthhas yielded similar results. For example, performance on a visual probe detectiontask, which requires participants to respond to nonemotional cues that are eitherspatially or temporally contiguous to emotional stimuli (Mogg & Bradley, 1998,2002), has been shown to differ between youth with some anxiety disorders andtheir nonanxious peers (Dalgleish et al., 2001; Pine et al., 2005c).It remains unclear whether, as several researchers have hypothesized, underlyingabnormalities in attention regulation predispose individuals toward anxiousbehavior (Clark et al., 1990; MacLeod et al., 2002; Mogg & Bradley, 2002) or,alternatively, if changes in levels of anxiety influence the functioning of attentionalprocesses. If the former hypothesis is true, as results of some studies suggest(Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000; Wilson et al., 2006), attention allocation taskscould be used to help identify individuals who are at high risk for anxiety. If,however, the latter hypothesis were confirmed, it would suggest that attention biasabnormalities constitute epiphenomena rather than risk factors for later anxiety.Neural Development and Attention-EmotionInteractions in AdolescenceAs noted above, results from a growing body of studies suggests that attention tothreat-related information is perturbed during states of anxiety. Such findings