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Cognitive Biases in Childhood Anxiety, Depression, and Aggression: Are They Pervasive or Specific?

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Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which children’s negative information processing biases are pervasive across the cognitive modalities of attention, judgment, and memory and, further, whether such biases are specifically associated with anxiety, depression, and/or aggression. 133 children between the ages of 8 and 14 years were assessed on an attention allocation task, a vignette interpretation measure, and a memory recall task. Children also completed anxiety and depression inventories, and were rated by teachers on a measure of aggression. Overall the results suggested a predominantly pervasive negative bias associated with childhood psychopathology, with some evidence of specificity. The canonical correlation analyses indicated that high levels of anxiety, depression, and aggression were associated with biases: attention to negative information, interpretation of ambiguous situations as negative, and preferential recall of negative words. Above this general bias, anxiety displayed a specific association with attention to negative information in the univariate analyses.

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Notes

  1. Following Vasey et al, (1996), the dot-probe task was originally scored to give separate attention allocation scores for the upper and lower probe position. Using only the lower probe position score, as in previous research, resulted in a weakened effect compared to the score averaged across the upper and lower position

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the school principals and teachers who generously welcomed our research and the children who volunteered to participate for being so insightful and entertaining. Thanks must also go to those who helped code and collate the data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Karen Salmon & Peter F. Lovibond

  2. Centre for Adolescent Health, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Victoria, 3052, Australia

    Sophie C. Reid

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  1. Sophie C. Reid
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  2. Karen Salmon
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  3. Peter F. Lovibond
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Correspondence to Sophie C. Reid.

Appendix

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Table 4 Canonical loadings and coefficients of the relationship between anxiety, fear, depression, aggression, and information processing in canonical variate 2
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Reid, S.C., Salmon, K. & Lovibond, P.F. Cognitive Biases in Childhood Anxiety, Depression, and Aggression: Are They Pervasive or Specific?. Cogn Ther Res 30, 531–549 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-006-9077-y

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