Background Though associations between parenting styles marked by control (e.g.,

This study examined relations between anxiety, aggression, social understanding, IQ, and diagnosis in a sample of 231 children (ages 2-9) diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs; Autistic Disorder, Asperger's Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified) in a hospital setting. Children were administered tests of IQ, and parents completed measures of remaining variables. ASD diagnosis was associated with level of anxiety, and level of IQ explained this relation. IQ was significantly and positively associated with anxiety. Tests of a developmental model to explain the relation between IQ and anxiety showed that social understanding and aggression mediated the relation for toddlers. For preschool- and early elementary school-aged children, respectively, three-way interactions between IQ, social understanding, and aggression predicted anxiety, and graphs of the interactions suggest that the association between IQ and anxiety is increasingly driven by either aggression or social understanding over the course of childhood.

A number of factors are believed to confer risk for anxiety development in children; however, cultural variation of purported risk factors remains unclear. We examined relations between controlling and rejecting parenting styles, parental modeling of anxious behaviors, child interpretive biases, and child anxiety in a mixed clinically anxious (n = 27) and non-clinical (n = 20) sample of Latino children and at least one of their parents. Families completed discussion-based tasks and questionnaires in a lab setting. Results indicated that child anxiety was: linked with parental control and child interpretative biases; associated with parental modeling of anxious behaviors at a trend level; and not associated with low parental acceptance. Findings that controlling parenting and child interpretive biases were associated with anxiety extend current theories of anxiety development to the Latino population. We speculate that strong family ties may buffer Latino children from detrimental effects of perceived low parental acceptance.

The present study examined effects of maternal anxiety, child age, and their interaction on motherchild anxiety reporting disagreement while taking into account the direction of each informant's report relative to the other. Participants were 41 dyads of mothers and clinically anxious children aged 7-13. A hierarchical regression revealed a significant interaction between maternal anxiety and child age (β = .30, p < .05). A graph of this interaction indicated that when maternal anxiety is high and the child is older, maternal report of anxiety is relatively higher, and when maternal anxiety is high and the child is younger, child report of anxiety is relatively higher. When maternal anxiety is low, the reporting discrepancy is relatively stable across age. Results may help explain previous mixed findings regarding effects of age and maternal anxiety on reporting discrepancies. Possible explanations for these results are discussed. Keywordsanxiety; children; parent-child agreement; self-report; parent-report Parent-Child Reporting DisagreementA substantial body of research demonstrates low rates of concordance in endorsement of symptoms between children and other informants, such as parents and teachers (Bird, Gould, & Staghezza, 1992;De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2005;Klein, 1991;Reich & Earls, 1987). Studies comparing concordance between parent and child ratings of internalizing and externalizing disorders have generally demonstrated that agreement is lower for internalizing disorders (Achenbach, McConaughy, & Howell, 1987;Salbach-Andrae, Lenz, & Lehmkuhl, 2009), and rates of concordance have been especially low for anxiety disorders, whether measured via continuous measures (e.g., Barbosa, Tannock, & Manassis, 2002;Wren, Bridge, & Birmaher, 2004) or diagnostic interview (e.g., Choudhury, Pimentel, & Kendall, 2003;Grills & Ollendick, 2003). This general trend is consistent with findings that parents and children tend to have higher agreement in endorsement of overt than covert anxiety symptoms (Comer & Kendall, 2004), likely due to the lesser degree of access parents have to their child's thoughts and covert physical symptoms. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Evidence of low rates of agreement between parent-and child-reports has frequently been used to support use of multiple informants for assessing child anxiety following the rationale that each informant provides valid information from his or her unique perspective. Bird and colleagues (1992) suggested using the "or rule" for integrating discrepant reports wherein symptoms endorsed by either the paren...

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