| Summary: | The construct of 'Effortful Control' relates to the efficiency of executive attention. It is the self-regulatory aspect of temperament which involves the ability to inhibit a dominant response and activate a subdominant response. The literature review explores evidence for the link between anxiety in children and attentional biases to threat, and whether this can be explained in terms of individual differences in effortful / executive control. The empirical paper presents a study using a multi- informant methodology carried out on a normative population of nine to eleven year old school children. It employs questionnaire and computerised measures of effortful control and anxiety. The results provide evidence for a weak attentional bias effect in anxious children to angry faces linked to difficulties with disengagement of attention. Unexpectedly, no significant interactions were found between effortful control and anxiety in relation to the anger disengagement effect. However, there were significant effects for self-reported aggression, teacher reported externalising problems, and IQ on the anger disengagement effect. The critical appraisal highlights some of the limitations of the study, explores some of the clinical implications of the research, and suggests some ideas for the direction of future investigations into attention and anxiety in children.
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