Research published in Child Psychiatry and Human Development suggests that children’s cognitive biases and anxiety symptoms encourage fear-enhancing behavior in parents, and not the other way around.
Anxiety in youth is alarmingly common, sparking much research into its etiology. One prominent theory suggests that cognitive biases during information processing can help maintain anxiety in children. One such bias is confirmation bias, which refers to the tendency to look for information that confirms one’s viewpoint while ignoring alternate information. Another is interpretation bias, which refers to the tendency to interpret ambiguous information as threatening.
A study by Lorraine Fliek and associates aimed to explore whether parents can influence the development of these cognitive biases in their children, through the modeling of fearful/anxious behaviors and through verbal discussions about threat. To examine the interplay between fear-enhancing parenting, cognitive biases, and children’s anxiety, related data were collected from children and their parents at three time points over the course of a year.
A total of 216 Dutch children (aged 7-12) and their parents took part in an initial study and two follow-ups six months and one year later. The children completed the Parental Enhancement of Anxious Cognitions (PEAC) scale, where they rated the frequency of 6 items related to the modeling behavior of their parents (e.g., “This parent shows me that he/she is afraid to do certain things”), and 8 items concerning the way threat is communicated by their parents (e.g., “This parent warns me explicitly that I should avoid dangerous situations”).
Children also completed an assessment of anxiety symptoms and two tasks to measure their confirmation bias and interpretation bias. For each child, either their mother, father or both parents additionally completed the PEAC scale, where they rated their own modeling behavior and threat communication.
As expected, results showed that children with higher anxiety scores displayed higher interpretation and confirmation biases at each of the three time points.
Next, while researchers found some support for a model in which parents’ fear-enhancing behaviors promoted children’s cognitive biases and anxiety, their analysis mostly pointed to a relationship in the other direction. Children’s anxiety and cognitive biases seemed to promote their parents’ modeling and threat communication behaviors. The researchers propose that “a scenario in which anxiety symptoms and cognitive biases in children elicit anxious parenting is at least as likely as one in which fear-enhancing parenting elicits cognitive biases and anxiety.”
Finally, the children’s cognitive bias and anxiety symptoms were relatively stable across the three time points. “The most important practical implication of this finding is that there seems to be a reliably identifiable subgroup of children with continuing high levels of anxiety symptoms that also show the typical concomitant cognitive features of this type of psychopathology,” the authors say, suggesting that this group might benefit from intervention.
Among limitations, mothers were overrepresented in the data and most assessments only included reports from one informant (child or parent). Future studies that incorporate interviews or observational techniques would enhance the validity of the assessments.
The study, “A Longitudinal Study on the Relations Among Fear-Enhancing Parenting, Cognitive Biases, and Anxiety Symptoms in Non-clinical Children”, was authored by Lorraine Fliek, Jeffrey Roelofs, Gerard van Breukelen, and Peter Muris.