Abstract
Observational fear learning can contribute to the development of fear-related psychopathologies, such as anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. Observational fear learning is especially relevant during childhood. Parent-child attachment and anxiety sensitivity modulate fear reactions and fear learning but their impact on observational fear learning has not been investigated. This study investigated how these factors contribute to observational fear learning in children. We examined this question among 55 healthy parent-child dyads. Children (8–12 years old) watched a video of their parent undergoing a direct fear conditioning protocol, where one stimulus (CS+Parent) was paired with a shock and one was not (CS−), and a video of a stranger for whom a different stimulus was reinforced (CS+Stranger). Subsequently, all stimuli were presented to children (without shocks) while skin conductance responses were recorded to evaluate fear levels. Our results showed that children more sensitive to anxiety and who had lower father-child relationship security levels exhibited higher skin conductance responses to the CS+Parent. Our data suggest that the father-child relationship security influences vicarious fear transmission in children who are more sensitive to anxiety. This highlights the importance of the father-child relationship security as a potential modulator of children’s vulnerability to fear-related psychopathologies.
Highlights
Anxiety and fear-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), aggregate within families
Twenty-eight parent-child dyads of the initial 83 dyads were excluded from the analyses: technical difficulties resulting in a loss of skin conductance response (SCR) signal (n = 3), drop-out before the direct expression test/extinction learning phase (n = 1), no paternal figure and no completion of the Security Scale-Child Self-Report questionnaire for the father (n = 4), incomplete data for the Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index (CASI) (n = 1) and no awareness of the contingency (n = 19)
Children who were not aware of the contingency were excluded based on results from previous studies showing that contingency awareness is necessary to observe differential SCR (Hamm and Vaitl, 1996; Lovibond and Shanks, 2002; Hamm and Weike, 2005; Tabbert et al, 2006, 2010, 2011)
Summary
Anxiety and fear-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), aggregate within families. Results showed that children’s subjective fear levels significantly increased for animals that were associated with the fearful faces (Askew and Field, 2007). In an observational fear learning protocol with parentchild dyads, children exhibited higher physiological fear levels to stimuli for which their parent or a stranger received a shock compared to a stimulus that was not reinforced. Mother-child dyads and father-child dyads showed similar physiological fear levels, suggesting that children can learn fear from both parents to the same extent (Marin et al, 2020a). Together, these results demonstrate that observational fear learning can be induced in laboratory settings and that children seem to learn as much from their parent than a stranger
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