Fear-related associations in children of parents with an anxiety disorder.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Children of parents with an anxiety disorder are at elevated risk for developing an anxiety disorder themselves. According to cognitive theories, a possible risk factor is the development of schema-related associations. This study is the first to investigate whether children of anxious parents display fear-related associations and whether these associations relate to parental anxiety. METHODS: 44 children of parents with panic disorder, 27 children of parents with social anxiety disorder, and 84 children of parents without an anxiety disorder filled out the SCARED-71, and the children performed an Affective Priming Task. RESULTS: We found partial evidence for disorder-specificity: When the primes were related to their parent's disorder and the targets were negative, the children of parents with panic disorder and children of parents with social anxiety disorder showed the lowest error rates related to their parents' disorder, but they did not have faster responses. We did not find any evidence for the expected specificity in the relationship between the parents' or the children's self-reported anxiety and the children's fear-related associations, as measured with the APT. LIMITATIONS: Reliability of the Affective Priming Task was moderate, and power was low for finding small interaction effects. CONCLUSIONS: Whereas clearly more research is needed, our results suggest that negative associations may qualify as a possible vulnerability factor for children of parents with an anxiety disorder.

Biases in Interpretation as a Vulnerability Factor for Children of Parents With an Anxiety Disorder.

OBJECTIVE: Children of parents with an anxiety disorder have a higher risk of developing an anxiety disorder than children of parents without an anxiety disorder. Parental anxiety is not regarded as a causal risk factor itself, but is likely to be mediated via other mechanisms, for example via cognitive factors. We investigated whether children of parents with an anxiety disorder would show an interpretation bias corresponding to the diagnosis of their parent. We also explored whether children's interpretation biases were explained by parental anxiety and/or children's levels of anxiety. METHOD: In total, 44 children of parents with a panic disorder (PD), 27 children of parents with a social anxiety disorder (SAD), 7 children of parents with SAD/PD, and 84 children of parents without an anxiety disorder (controls) participated in this study. Parents and children filled out the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (SCARED) questionnaire, and children performed two ambiguous scenario tasks: one with and one without video priming. RESULTS: Children of parents with PD displayed significantly more negative interpretations of panic scenarios and social scenarios than controls. Negative interpretations of panic scenarios were explained by parental PD diagnosis and children's anxiety levels. These effects were not found for children of parents with SAD. Priming did not affect interpretation. CONCLUSION: Our results showed that children of parents with PD have a higher chance of interpreting ambiguous situations more negatively than children of parents without anxiety disorders. More research is needed to study whether this negative bias predicts later development of anxiety disorders in children.

The Role of Cognitive Factors in Childhood Social Anxiety: Social Threat Thoughts and Social Skills Perception.

Models of cognitive processing in anxiety disorders state that socially anxious children display several distorted cognitive processes that maintain their anxiety. The present study investigated the role of social threat thoughts and social skills perception in relation to childhood trait and state social anxiety. In total, 141 children varying in their levels of social anxiety performed a short speech task in front of a camera and filled out self-reports about their trait social anxiety, state anxiety, social skills perception and social threat thoughts. Results showed that social threat thoughts mediated the relationship between trait social anxiety and state anxiety after the speech task, even when controlling for baseline state anxiety. Furthermore, we found that children with higher trait anxiety and more social threat thoughts had a lower perception of their social skills, but did not display a social skills deficit. These results provide evidence for the applicability of the cognitive social anxiety model to children.

"What I believe is true": Belief-confirming reasoning bias in social anxiety disorder.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Research shows that people tend to consider believable conclusions as valid and unbelievable conclusions as invalid (belief bias). When applied to anxiogenic beliefs, this belief bias could well hinder the correction of dysfunctional convictions. Previous work has shown that high socially anxious students indeed display such fear-confirming, belief biased, reasoning. A critical next question is whether these findings translate to a clinical population of people with social anxiety disorder (SAD). We test whether (i) patients with SAD show belief bias with regard to SAD-relevant themes, (ii) this belief bias is specific for SAD patients or can also be found in panic disorder (PD) patients, (iii) differential belief bias effects in SAD are restricted to social anxiety concerns or are also evident in the context of reasoning with neutral themes. METHOD: 45 SAD patients, 24 PD patients, and 45 non-symptomatic controls (NSCs) completed a syllogistic belief bias task with SAD-relevant and neutral content. RESULTS: SAD patients displayed belief bias for social anxiety related materials, while the PD group and the NSC group did not. Yet, the difference between SAD and PD was not significant. All groups showed similar belief bias effects for neutral content. LIMITATIONS: Content of the belief bias task was not tailored to idiosyncratic beliefs. The study lacked power to detect medium or small differences. CONCLUSIONS: SAD patients showed concern-congruent belief biased interference effects when judging the logical validity of social anxiety relevant syllogisms. Such concern-relevant belief bias may contribute to the persistence of anxiogenic beliefs.

A new instrument to assess participant motivation for involvement in preventive interventions.

The Nijmegen Motivation List for Prevention (NML-P) is a new instrument to assess the motivation of participants for involvement in preventive group interventions. The aim of the current study was to explore the underlying dimensions of the NML-P and the predictive potential of the instrument for those participating in a psychoeducational preventive group intervention for depression: the Coping with Depression course. Principal component analyses revealed four components: readiness to participate, social support, doubt, and burden. Preliminary prediction analyses showed doubt, support, and burden to be related to the outcome of the depression prevention intervention.