Interpretation of ambiguous emotional information in clinically anxious children and adolescents

Abstract

Cognitive theories of anxiety based on adult data predict that individuals vulnerable to anxiety should show threat-related interpretations of ambiguous material and it is proposed that this is an important maintaining factor in anxiety disorders. In the present study, interpretation of ambiguous emotional/neutral information was examined in child and adolescent anxious patients. Two groups of participants, anxious patients (n = 17) and healthy controls (n = 40), were presented with a series of homographs, each with a threatening and a neutral interpretation. For each homograph, the participants were asked to construct a sentence using the homograph. Anxious children and adolescents produced significantly more sentences consistent with threatening homograph interpretations and less consistent with neutral interpretations than did normal controls. Regression analyses revealed no relationship between age and this interpretive bias. Preliminary developmental and theoretical implications are discussed.

The Plasticity of Adolescent Cognitions: Data from a Novel Cognitive Bias Modification Training Task

“…This approach draws on two sets of findings. First, paralleling adult findings [4], growing data implicate cognitive biases in child and adolescent anxiety, particularly in the tendency to draw negative interpretations from ambiguous material [5][6][7][8]. Second, recent adult studies show that inducing functionally similar biases using computerised training can alter mood.…”

Interpretation bias characterizes trait rumination

“…Because few rumination-related homographs are available in Hebrew, we did not use a fully randomized design in matching homograph primes with the four types of word targets and with non-word targets. We were most interested in differential priming of the related negative and benign meanings of the homographs (for a similar approach see Taghavi, Moradi, Neshat-Doost, Yule & Dalgleish, 2000). Therefore, each of the 20 homographs that we considered -best‖ (for which negative and benign associates were generated with approximately equal frequency) was randomly matched across participants to a target that was related to either the negative or the benign meaning of the prime.…”

Anxiety and Callous-Unemotional Traits: Physiological and Behavioral Responses to Others' Distress

“…Interestingly, although anxiety by itself predicted reduced aggression under such ambiguous circumstances, anxiety actually sensitized youth with CU to aggress more than seen in CU youth without anxiety. It is possible that the increased attention to distress cues noted among CU youth experiencing anxiety represents a sensitivity to negative emotional cues in general, similar to the attentional biases towards negative-and threat-related cues (Mogg & Bradley, 2005;Reid et al, 2006), and bias towards interpreting ambiguous information negatively (Taghavi et al, 2000) documented among anxious children. While CU traits have not previously been associated with a hostile attribution bias (HAB; Dodge, Price, Bachorowski, & Newman, 1990;Frick et al, 2003a;Helseth, Waschbusch, King, & Willoughby, 2015), perhaps the combination of cognitive biases associated with anxiety and the callousness of CU traits yields the impulsive, aggressive reactivity documented in these youth (e.g., Fanti et al, 2013;Kahn et al, 2013).…”

“…When children with CU experience anxiety symptoms, they may be particularly at risk for difficulties accurately identifying others' emotions, as anxiety is associated with its own unique pattern of social-cognitive biases, including biased attention towards threatrelated stimuli (Taghavi, Moradi, & Neshat-Doost, Yule, & Dalgleish, 2000) and a tendency to interpret neutral stimuli as negative or threatening (Reid, Salmon, & Lovibond, 2006). Although Kimonis and colleagues (2012) examined attention to distress cues among children with CU and anxiety using distressing pictures in a dot-probe task, the extant literature on anxiety in children with CU traits has not investigated perceptions of peer emotion in experimental tasks approximating social interactions.…”

“…However, the practice of blending community recruitment with recruitment of youth with serious behavior problems in order to yield a CP-enhanced sample is not unprecedented in the CU and anxiety literature (e.g., Docherty et al, 2015). Third, the sample included mostly anxiety (e.g., Fanti et al, 2013), and the potential for interactive social-cognitive biases associated with both CU (e.g., Pardini, 2011) and anxiety (e.g., Taghavi et al, 2000), future research would do well to assess the role of cognition more extensively. Moreover, children displayed relatively high aggression overall during the SuperBuilder task, reducing the variability of aggression that could be predicted.…”