The Role of Cognitive Factors in Childhood Social Anxiety: Social Threat Thoughts and Social Skills Perception

Abstract

Models of cognitive processing in anxiety disorders state that socially anxious children display several distorted cognitive processes that maintain their anxiety. The present study investigated the role of social threat thoughts and social skills perception in relation to childhood trait and state social anxiety. In total, 141 children varying in their levels of social anxiety performed a short speech task in front of a camera and filled out self-reports about their trait social anxiety, state anxiety, social skills perception and social threat thoughts. Results showed that social threat thoughts mediated the relationship between trait social anxiety and state anxiety after the speech task, even when controlling for baseline state anxiety. Furthermore, we found that children with higher trait anxiety and more social threat thoughts had a lower perception of their social skills, but did not display a social skills deficit. These results provide evidence for the applicability of the cognitive social anxiety model to children.

The Role of Self-reports and Behavioral Measures of Interpretation Biases in Children with Varying Levels of Anxiety

“…Because we were unable to test all children individually, 141 children (101 girls) between 8 and 13 years of age ( M = 10.0, SD = 1.1) were selected, such that (1) levels of social anxiety and spider fear were approximately normally distributed, and (2) approximately the same number of girls/boys scored in the lower and higher regions on self-reported anxiety. The current sample partly overlapped with two other studies that focused on other biases [ 28 , 30 ]. The Ethical Committee of the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, approved this study.…”

Personality, Cognition and Life Events as Predictors of Emotional Distress in Adolescence

“…Moreover, attaching greater importance to negative events, as shown by the research, predisposes young people to frequently experience emotional distress. Observing the causes of negative situations in external factors, a person distances from the problems and thus prevents the person from activating in solving situations (Novović et al, 2001;van Niekerk et al, 2016).…”

“…The appearance of negative emotional reactions in adolescents is largely under the influence of cognition and perception of the situation (Lazarus & Folkamn, 1984;Silver & Worthman, 1979;Tucker, 1996;van Niekerk et al, 2016). Attribution style represents a consistent and permanent way of attributing the causes of events (Novović, Biro, Smederevac, & Kosanović, 2001).…”

A Review of Behavioral Observation Coding Approaches for the Trier Social Stress Test for Children

“…Although it was originally developed for use with adult samples, the TSST has since been modified for children (TSST-C) and has been used with children as young as 7 years old (e.g., Buske-Kirschbaum et al, 1997, 2003). To further accommodate a range of subsamples, developmental levels, and experimental constraints, various other modifications have been used such as omitting the post-speech arithmetic task altogether (e.g., Heilbron et al, 2008), modifying the duration of the preparation and delivery phase of the speech (e.g., Jordan, 2008; Niekerk et al, 2017), and using video-recording rather than live judges (e.g., Cartwright-Hatton et al, 2003). In addition, studies diverge in the content or topic of the speech and common alterations have included asking participants to present on how a story would unfold (e.g., Panjwani et al, 2016; Wedl et al, 2016), the content of a text (e.g., Roth and Herzberg, 2017), one of multiple provided topics (Oppenheimer et al, 2016), running for class president (Geiss, 2016), and what makes a good friend (Benoit, 2013; Rith-Najarian et al, 2014).…”