title: Anxiety, threat perception abnormalities, and emotional reasoning in nonclinical Dutch children.
abstract: Examined the relation between childhood anxiety and threat-perception abnormalities using vignettes in which external (i.e., exposure to potential threat cues) and internal (i.e., experience of anxiety responses) information were systematically varied. Nonclinical children (N = 156) aged 8 to 13 years completed anxiety questionnaires and were then exposed to 3 types of stories: ambiguous stories, ambiguous + anxiety-response stories, and nonthreatening stories. From children's responses to these stories, a number of threat-perception indexes were derived. Results showed that both external and internal information inflated children's perception of threat. Further, high levels of anxiety were accompanied by enhanced threat perception in response to external threat cues. Finally, little evidence was found that high levels of anxiety, and in particular of anxiety sensitivity, were associated with a greater tendency to use internal information (i.e., emotional reasoning). Potential avenues for future studies on anxiety-related threat-perception distortions are briefly discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical, Clinical, and Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. p.muris@dep.unimaas.n
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Muris
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Merckelbach
authors.forename: Suzanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schepers
authors.forename: Cor
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Meesters
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D009426:Netherlands; D010469:Perceptual Distortion / Q000502:physiology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires