Social Information Processing in Children: Specific Relations to Anxiety, Depression, and Affect

Abstract

Two studies examined shared and unique relations of social information processing (SIP) to youth's anxious and depressive symptoms. Whether SIP added unique variance over and above trait affect in predicting internalizing symptoms was also examined. In Study 1, 215 youth (ages 8-13) completed symptom measures of anxiety and depression and a vignette-based interview measure of SIP. Anxiety and depression were each related to a more negative information-processing style. Only depression was uniquely related to a less positive information processing style. In Study 2, 127 youth (ages 10-13) completed measures of anxiety, depression, SIP, and trait affect. SIP's relations to internalizing symptoms were replicated. Over and above negative affect, negative SIP predicted both anxiety and depression. Low positive SIP added variance over and above positive affect in predicting only depression. Finally, SIP functioning partially mediated the relations of affect to internalizing symptoms.

Aggression Among Children with ADHD, Anxiety, or Co-occurring Symptoms: Competing Exacerbation and Attenuation Hypotheses

“…Whereas ADHD is associated with both reactive and proactive aggression, albeit moreso with the former (Bennett et al 2004;Dodge et al 1997;Waschbusch et al 1998), anxiety has only been positively associated with reactive aggression (Raine et al 2006;Vitaro et al 2002). This is not surprising given that reactive aggressive behaviors are hasty reactions to perceived threat or hostility (Card and Little 2006), and both impulsivity and biased attributions are impaired in youth with ADHD as well as anxiety (e.g., Luebbe et al 2010;Wilens et al 2002). Youth with co-occurring anxiety and ADHD symptoms may have particularly severe deficits in these areas, and as a result, display exacerbated reactive aggression compared to youth with ADHD or anxiety alone.…”

Examining the Presence of Anxiety in Aggressive Individuals: The Illuminating Role of Fight-or-Flight Mechanisms

“…Crick and Dodge (1994) proposed a model of SIP that including a range of mechanisms (i.e., encoding of cues, attributions of intent, goal orientation, response generation, response evaluation) that interact together to determine behavior in social interactions. Dysfunction in any one of these components can be linked to pathological behavior including overactive fight (e.g., Lansford et al 2010) or flight (e.g., Luebbe et al 2010) responding.…”

Measurement Invariance and Convergent Validity of Anger and Sadness Self-Regulation Among Youth From Six Cultural Groups

“…Some attributional biases may be self-blaming, depressive attribution biases, and others may be other-blaming, hostile attribution biases. Concurrent and longitudinal evidence suggests that negative self-blaming attribution biases are related to depressive symptoms (e.g., Luebbe, Bell, Allwood, Swenson, & Early, 2010; Prinstein, Cheah, & Guyer, 2005), whereas hostile other-blaming attribution biases are related to externalizing symptoms (e.g., Orobio de Castro et al, 2002). …”