Abstract
This paper explores whether the increased vulnerability of children of anxious parents to develop anxiety disorders may be partially explained by these children having increased cognitive biases towards threat compared with children of non-anxious parents. Parents completed questionnaires about their child’s anxiety symptoms. Children aged 5–9 (n = 85) participated in two cognitive bias tasks: 1) an emotion recognition task, and 2) an ambiguous situations questionnaire. For the emotion recognition task, there were no significant differences between at-risk children and children of non-anxious parents in their cognitive bias scores for reaction times or for accuracy in identifying angry or happy facial expressions. In addition, there were no significant differences between at-risk children and children of non-anxious parents in the number of threat interpretations made for the ambiguous situations questionnaire. It is possible that these cognitive biases only become present subsequent to the development of an anxiety disorder, or only in older at-risk children.
Highlights
This paper explores whether the increased vulnerability of children of anxious parents to develop anxiety disorders may be partially explained by these children having increased cognitive biases towards threat compared with children of non-anxious parents
The current study explores whether children at-risk of developing anxiety disorders are more likely to show emotion recognition biases and threat interpretation biases compared with children of non-anxious parents
Cognitive bias scores were calculated by subtracting the reaction time for recognising happy faces from the reaction time for recognising angry faces on the face morph task, with positive scores reflecting a bias towards happy faces
Summary
This paper explores whether the increased vulnerability of children of anxious parents to develop anxiety disorders may be partially explained by these children having increased cognitive biases towards threat compared with children of non-anxious parents. For the emotion recognition task, there were no significant differences between at-risk children and children of non-anxious parents in their cognitive bias scores for reaction times or for accuracy in identifying angry or happy facial expressions. There were no significant differences between at-risk children and children of non-anxious parents in the number of threat interpretations made for the ambiguous situations questionnaire. Children with anxiety disorders show cognitive biases towards threat-relevant stimuli, such as attentional biases (Waters et al 2010), emotion recognition biases (Simonian et al 2001), and interpretation biases The current paper offers a preliminary exploration of this question by considering whether threat-relevant emotion recognition and interpretation biases are present in children at-risk of developing anxiety disorders. Children with anxiety disorders have been found to show an attentional bias towards
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