title: Does parental anxiety cause biases in the processing of child-relevant threat material?
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Anxiety leads to biases in processing personally relevant information. This study set out to examine whether anxious parents also experience biases in processing child-relevant material.
  
  
  METHODS
  Ninety parents acted as a control condition, or received a social anxiety or child-related anxiety induction. They completed a task examining attentional biases in relation to child-threat words and social-threat words, and a task examining ability to categorize emotion in children's faces and voices.
  
  
  RESULTS
  There was a trend indicating group differences in attentional bias towards social-threat words, and this appears to have been only in the social anxiety condition, but not the child anxiety or control conditions. For child-threat words, attentional bias was present in the child anxiety condition, but not the social anxiety or control conditions. In the emotion recognition task, there was no difference between the control and child anxiety conditions, but the social anxiety condition were more likely to erroneously label children's faces and voices as sad.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Parents' anxious biases may spill over into their child's world.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Parents' anxious biases may spill over into their child's world. Anxious parents may have attentional biases towards threats in their children's environment. Anxious parents may over-attribute negative emotion to children.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Pevensey Building, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
authors.forename: Sam
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Cartwright-Hatton
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Abeles
authors.forename: Clare
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dixon
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Holliday
authors.forename: Becky
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hills
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D002648:Child; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D016487:Parenting / Q000523:psychology; D010290:Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D012931:Social Environment; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000523:psychology; D014831:Voice / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult