PRESENTATION, EPIDEMIOLOGY, and COGNITIVE ACCOUNTS of CHILDHOOD ANXIETY: THEORY and EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS

Abstract

Anxiety disorders and trait anxiety are one of the most common and impairing psychological conditions in childhood and adolescence. They cause impairments in various developmental domains and create a heavy social and economic burden. To present an extensive overall perspective to current issues childhood anxiety, the first aim of this review is to outline the identifying hallmarks of diverse anxiety disorders, prevalence rates, manifestation, and prognosis in the light of recent research. With the growing interest on cognitive accounts of anxiety, the second aim is to present the trajectory of progress in our understanding of information processing and the related information processing biases en route to youth anxiety. Specifically, theories on distortions in children’s anxiogenic cognitions, the cognitive stages to process threat-related information, and the cognitive biases (i.e., attention, interpretation, and memory) pertaining to each stage were addressed. Finally, because attention bias is the first stage of information processing and there is a potential mediational association between these biases, the importance of eliminating attention bias for threat to further reduce the other biases as well as anxiety was highlighted.