Abstract
The transition from primary to secondary school is often associated with a period of heightened anxiety and worry. For most children, any feelings of anxiety subside relatively quickly but for a small minority, emotional difficulties can continue into the first year of secondary school and beyond. This study recruited 109 children and measured their anxiety symptoms and school concerns toward the end of primary school and again at the end of their first term of secondary school. We investigated for the first time whether pre-transition measures of attentional and interpretation bias, and the magnitude of change in attentional bias toward and away from threat stimuli were associated with pre- and post-transition measures of anxiety and school concerns, and the change in these measures over time. Over 50% of the current sample exceeded clinical levels of anxiety at pre-transition. However, anxiety symptoms and school concerns had significantly reduced by post-transition. Higher levels of pre-transition anxiety or school concerns, and a greater magnitude of change in attentional bias towards threat stimuli predicted a larger reduction in anxiety symptoms and school concerns across the transition period. A greater interpretation bias toward threat was associated with higher pre-transition anxiety symptoms and school concerns but not post-transition scores, or the change in these scores. While many children experience heightened anxiety prior to school transition, this appears to be largely temporary and self-resolves. Nonetheless, the current findings highlight the importance of monitoring children’s anxiety and concerns, and related cognitive processes during this important transition period.
Highlights
In the UK, most children move from primary to secondary school at 11 years of age
This study explored whether attentional biases, the malleability of attentional biases, and interpretation bias measured before school transition explained individual differences in changes in anxiety symptoms and school concerns over the transition period
Hypothesis 2 was partly supported with a greater threat interpretation bias associated with higher pre-transition anxiety symptoms and school concerns but not post-transition scores
Summary
In the UK, most children move from primary to secondary school at 11 years of age. At the time of transition, many children experience worry and anxiety, which typically subsides relatively quickly over the first term of secondary school (Rice et al 2011; Stradling and MacNeil 2001; Zeedyk et al 2003). There is reasonable evidence that heightened symptoms of anxiety are associated with cognitive biases in attention and interpretation that favour the selective processing of threat (Bar-Haim et al 2007; Dudeney et al 2015; Lau and Waters 2017; Suarez and Bell-Dolan 2001) These biases are thought to contribute causally to the onset and/or maintenance of symptoms (Van Bockstaele et al 2014), and to impact emotional response to stressors (Hakamata et al 2010; Osinsky et al 2012), this evidence is somewhat more mixed in child samples (Dodd et al 2012; Dudeney et al 2015). Findings have been more equivocal in child samples (Cristea et al 2015)
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