Anxiety, depression, and judgments about the probability of future negative and positive events in children

Origins of common fears in South African children

“…On one hand, this result may reflect a reporter bias, that is black and colored children reported more learning events because their fears were more intense. For instance, there is evidence showing that anxious children tend to provide higher probability ratings of negative events (Muris & Van der Heiden, 2006;Rheingold, Herbert, & Franklin, 2003). On the other hand, it is also possible that differences in the living conditions accounted for this finding.…”

The influence of affect on higher level cognition: A review of research on interpretation, judgement, decision making and reasoning

“…Martin, Horder, & Jones, 1992;Martin & Jones, 1995) proposes that cognitive processes are an inherent component of emotion and therefore biases that are present in anxious adults should also be evident in anxious children. The typical finding in empirical studies is that clinically anxious children make more threatrelated interpretations of ambiguous stories than non-anxious children (Muris & van der Heiden, 2006;Taghavi, Moradi, Neshat-Doost, Yule, & Dalgleish, 2000;Waters, Craske, Bergman, & Treanor, 2008). This is also true of non-clinical high anxious children (Higa & Daleiden, 2008).…”

“…Some findings suggest that this might be restricted to judgements that are self-relevant (Muris & van der Heiden, 2006), and that the anxiety-congruent judgements do not extend to events happening to others.…”

Anxiety‐Related Reasoning Biases in Children and Adolescents

“…This probability bias effect was present for events referring to themselves as well as for events referring to other children. A further study by Muris and Van der Heiden (2006) employed a similar procedure to assess anxiety-related probability bias in nonclinical children aged between 10 and 13 years. Again, high-anxious children displayed significantly higher probability estimates of future negative events as compared to low-anxious children, but this time the difference only reached statistical significance for the self-referent negative events.…”