| Abstract | Destructive marital conflict can negatively impact children’s socioemotional development. Emotional security theory (EST) postulates that the quality of the parent’s relationship impacts the child’s security in their family. Revisions to EST have hypothesized that children may be attuned to social threat cues, such as angry faces, during marital conflict and those cues may be influencing their responses to marital conflict. The current study had several goals: 1) to examine factors influencing attention to social threat cues, and 2) to determine the extent to which attention to social threat cues predicts responses to interparental conflict. Participants consisted of 28 adolescents between the ages of 10 and 17, who completed a dot probe task and viewed marital conflict videos while having their physical responses measured. Results showed that time spent viewing threat cues was not a mediator of physiological or behavioral responses to marital conflict, but that as threat bias increased, time spent focusing on facial threat cues decreased. Implications and future directions are discussed as well. |
