Information Processing Biases and Anxiety || Learning of Information Processing Biases in Anxious Children and Adolescents

✍ Scribed by Hadwin, Julie A.; Field, Andy P.

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 598 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 0470998199
• DOI: 10.1002/9780470661468.ch11

✦ Synopsis

Learning Cognitive Biases

We have seen throughout this book that there is compelling evidence that anxiety vulnerability is associated with distinctive patterns of attentional and interpretive bias. Clinical and experimental theories assume that these processing biases represent a causal substrate that operates to influence cognitive representation in such a way as to directly mediate anxiety vulnerability (see Beck and Clark, 1997 for a review; Williams et al., 1997). In Chapter 9, we saw that genetic studies show that 30-40% of the variance in cognitive biases is heritable, leaving environmental factors to explain the remaining two-thirds of the variance. In an extensive review exploring the mechanisms that underpin the development of cognitive distortions in childhood, Muris and Field (2008) concluded that although learning undoubtedly plays an important causal role, there is a distinct lack of research into (i) whether verbal information, vicarious learning and direct traumatic incidents create specific cognitive distortions in children; (ii) the mechanism through which these pathways achieve this change in the cognitive processing of threat material; and (iii) the role of parents in providing anxiogenic learning environments through which children acquire distorted cognitive processes. This chapter will be a speculative journey through the processes and mechanisms that might underlie the acquisition of information processing biases in childhood. The dearth of research in children that attempts to address the important question of from where information processing biases come permits us the luxuries of speculation and indulging our own theoretical whims in the hope of laying a