Facial gender but not emotion distinguishes neural responses of 10-to 13-year-old children with social anxiety disorder from healthy and clinical controls

Objective: The current study examined neural and behavioral responses to angry, happy and neutral faces in childhood social anxiety disorder (SAD). Method: Behavioral (reaction time and accuracy) and electrocortical measures (P100, N170, EPN, LPP) were assessed during a facial emotion identification task in children (age 10-13) with SAD (n = 32), clinical controls with mixed anxiety disorders (n = 30), and healthy controls (n = 33). Results: Overall, there were no group differences in behavioral or neural responses to emotional faces. However, children with SAD showed an attenuated LPP to male relative to female faces, while the opposite pattern emerged in the other two groups. Discussion: Stimulus gender, but not facial emotion drove group-specific effects, which became evident in later, more elaborate stages of attention processing. The present study provides preliminary indications of gender effects in childhood SAD which should be further investigated by future studies.