Biases in attention, interpretation, memory, and associations in children with varying levels of spider fear: Inter-relations and prediction of behavior

doi:10.1016/j.jbtep.2016.10.001

Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry

Volume 54, March 2017, Pages 285-291

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2016.10.001 Get rights and content

Highlights

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Cognitive biases each predict unique variance in spider fear-related behavior.
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Interpretation bias and fear-related associations remained significant predictors.
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Even when self-reported fear was included as a predictor.
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The cognitive bias tasks only showed little overlap.

Abstract

Background and Objectives

Cognitive theories suggest that cognitive biases may be related and together influence the anxiety response. However, little is known about the interrelations of cognitive bias tasks and whether they allow for an improved prediction of fear-related behavior in addition to self-reports. This study simultaneously addressed several types of cognitive biases in children, to investigate attention bias, interpretation bias, memory bias and fear-related associations, their interrelations and the prediction of behavior.

Methods

Eighty-one children varying in their levels of spider fear completed the Spider Anxiety and Disgust Screening for Children and performed two Emotional Stroop tasks, a Free Recall task, an interpretation task including size and distance indication, an Affective Priming Task, and a Behavioral Assessment Test.

Results

We found an attention bias, interpretation bias, and fear-related associations, but no evidence for a memory bias. The biases showed little overlap. Attention bias, interpretation bias, and fear-related associations predicted unique variance in avoidance of spiders. Interpretation bias and fear-related associations remained significant predictors, even when self-reported fear was included as a predictor.

Limitations

Children were not seeking help for their spider fear and were not tested on clinical levels of spider phobia.

Conclusions

This is the first study to find evidence that different cognitive biases each predict unique variance in avoidance behavior. Furthermore, it is also the first study in which we found evidence for a relation between fear of spiders and size and distance indication. We showed that this bias is distinct from other cognitive biases.

Section snippets

Participants

The current study was part of a large community-based project on childhood anxiety. After parental consent had been granted, a total of 718 children were screened on anxiety in their regular classroom environment. Approximately two months after initial screening, 95 children were invited to participate in this study. The children who participated in this study also participated in another study about social anxiety and were therefore pre-selected on levels of social anxiety. The data of 14

Emotional Stroop tasks (EST)

The overall number of mistakes was low, for both the EST-picture (0.8%) and the EST-word (0.5%). From the EST-picture card RTs and the EST-word card RTs, two relative scores related to spiders were computed; that is, the EST-picture score (RT-Spider minus RT-Neutral) and the EST-word score (RT-Spider minus RT-Neutral). Higher scores indicate larger distraction by the spider category. Two one-sample t-tests revealed that children did not show significant distraction specifically related to

Discussion

This study is the first to combine attention bias, interpretation bias, memory bias, and fear-related associations, to examine their inter-relations and to test the independent ability of these biases to predict avoidance of spiders in children. The first goal of this study was to replicate the findings of the current study to earlier studies by Klein et al., 2011, Klein et al., 2012. Consistent with our earlier results, we found that spider-fearful children displayed both attention bias and

Author note

We thank the elementary schools that participated in this study. We also thank the children and their parents who participated in the study, and Emmelie Flokstra and Rian Bakens for their assistance with data collection. Finally, we would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments. The Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University Nijmegen supported the study financially. All authors state that there is no declaration of interest.

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The Ethical Commission of the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University, The Netherlands, approved this study. The current study overlapped with two other studies that aimed to explain fear-related social anxiety (Van Niekerk et al., 2017) and spider fear (Klein et al., 2017). The AIT that was used in this study was based on the AIT developed by Dearing and Gotlib (2009).
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View full text

Biases in attention, interpretation, memory, and associations in children with varying levels of spider fear: Inter-relations and prediction of behavior

Highlights

Abstract

Background and Objectives

Methods

Results

Limitations

Conclusions

Section snippets

Participants

Emotional Stroop tasks (EST)

Discussion

Author note

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Journal of Anxiety Disorders

Clinical Psychology Review

Clinical Psychological Review

Behavior Therapy

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry

Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry

Journal of Anxiety Disorders

International Journal of Psychophysiology

Journal of Anxiety Disorders

Threat-related attentional bias in anxious and nonanxious individuals: A meta-analytic study

Psychological Bulletin

The information-processing paradigm: A valuable framework for clinical child and adolescent psychology

Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology

Stalking the perfect measure of implicit self-esteem: The blind man and the elephant revisited?

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Processing biases for emotional faces in 4- to 12- year-old non-clinical children: An exploratory study of developmental patterns and relationships with social anxiety and behavioral inhibition

Journal of Experimental Psychopathology

Patterns of processing bias for emotional information across clinical disorders: A comparison of attention, memory, and prospective cognition in children and adolescents with depression, generalized anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder

Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology

A structural analysis of indirect measures of attitudes

Predictive validity of an implicit association test for assessing anxiety

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Attention, interpretation, and memory biases in subclinical depression: A proof-of-principle-test of the combined cognitive biases hypothesis

Emotion

On the automatic activation of attitudes

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

When fair is foul and foul is fair: Reverse priming in automatic evaluation

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology