Social-Emotional Attention in School-Age Children: A Call for School-Based Intervention during COVID-19 and Distance Learning

Abstract

Early research indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent regulations put children at increased risk of negative mood, anxiety, attention difficulties, and social challenges. Concordantly, these difficulties also are associated with deficits in social-emotional attention in children. On a daily basis, students are required to process and respond to a large amount of complex social-emotional information, including attending to teachers and interacting with peers. These attentional demands and associated stressors have increased as students are required to stare at computer screens during online learning as a result of COVID-19 restrictions. However, there is a dearth of research that investigates the role of social and emotional information on attention in children. The present study assessed the effects of social relevance and emotional valence on attentional demands in children and how functioning is related to individual differences in symptoms and deficits that may be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that social and emotional information affect attention in children. Task performance also was associated with negative mood, social stress, and attention focus. This study highlights the need for school-based distance learning interventions to help ameliorate negative social-emotional risks of the COVID-19 pandemic in children. Potential effective avenues include mindfulness-based interventions and attention bias modification training.