Journal of Clinical Child Psychology

1996, Vol. 25, No. 2, 170-176

Copyright O 1996 by
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Cognitive Processing in Children: Relation to

Anxiety and Family Influences
Bruce F. Chorpita, Anne Marie Albano, and David H. Barlow
Centerfor Stress and Anxiety Disorders
University at Albany, State University of New York
Used an information-processing task to investigate cognitive biases associated with
trait anxiety in children. Participants were presented with ambiguous situations
requiring them to generate interpretations and behavioral plans. m e influence of
parents on children's interpretations was also assessed by administering the ambiguous-situations questionnaire (ASQ)before and after a f m i l y discussion of those same
situations. Results demonstrated a high correlation between trait anxiety scores and
anxious responses during the ASQ ( p < .01). In addition, parents' intervening
discussion appeared to be related to changes in children's anxious responding.
Although preliminary, the findings imply that cognitive biases related to anxiety in
children are similar to those found in adults, and that parents might play a role in
influencing the degree of these biases.

There is a detailed conceptualization of cognitive

processes in anxious adults, the essence of which serves
as a useful guide for examination of these phenomena
in children. The adult literature demonstratesnumerous
information-processingbiases associated with interpretive tasks (Butler & Mathews, 1983, 1987; Eysenck,
MacLeod, & Mathews, 1987;Mathews, Mogg, May, &
Eysenck, 1989) and suggests that these biases are reflective of an enduring condition moderated by hyperoperative danger schemata (e.g., Craske & Barlow,
1991).Consistent with this notion, Butler and Mathews
(1983) found that anxious adults also demonstrated
higher perceived probability of risk, as well as increased
ratings of "cost" for aversive outcomes.
A reasonable inference is that these schemata are
pervasive and may be present as early as childhood.
Unlike adult research in this area, however, the investigation of a cognitive model in children must acknowledge that these responses in children are also subject
to the influence of their primary caretakers. For example, several studies have demonstrated that anxiety has
familial influences (Last, Hersen, Kazdii, Orvaschel,
& Perrin, 1991; Turner, Baidel, & Costello, 1987) that
may include parental modeling of avoidance (Silverman, Cerny, Nelles, & Burke, 1988). A thorough model
Portions of this research were presented at the 27th meeting of the
Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, November 1993,
Atlanta, and the 29th meeting of the Association for Advancement of
Behavior Therapy, November 1995, Washington, DC.
We thank Mark Dadds for his helpful comments on an earlierdraft,
and Tracy Collica and Sarabeth Litt for their assistance in coding.
e Chorpita, Center
Requests for reprints should be sent to B ~ c F.
for Stress and Anxiety Disorders, 1535Western Avenue, Albany, NY
12203.

of the cognitive mechanisms involved in childhood

anxiety would benefit therefore from an understanding
of not only the nature of any biases, but also the potential family influences on these biases.
Some of the first empirical research involving a
direct examination of cognitive interpretive style in
anxious children has been conducted recently (Barrett,
Rapee, & Dadds, 1993; Dadds, Heard, & Rapee, 1992).
Children were asked to complete a questionnaire similar to the ambiguous-situations task outlined by Butler
and Mathews (1983). Parents completed the same questionnaire, after which the family discusses the answers
together to arrive at a mutual solution. The degree to
which parents model, prompt, and reward anxiety in
their children is assessed during the discussion. Results
indicated that clinically anxious children perceived
more threat than noncliniccontrols. In addition,anxious
interpretation increased for clinically anxious children
following discussion with parents (Barrett, Rapee, &
Dadds, 1993).
A similar investigation of cognitive phenomena in
children was conducted by Schneider, Unnewehr, Florin, Margraf, and Dornier (1991). However, unlike the
study of Dadds et al. (1992), which examined anxious
children's sensitivity to transient influences on cognitive processing styles, Schneider et al. (1991) focused
on transmission of cognitive biases from adults diagnosed with an anxiety disorder to their children. Children of patients with panic disorder and simple phobia
were compared with children of control families for the
degree to which an anxious model influenced children's subsequent interpretation of ambiguous events.
The findings suggested that, at least for panic disorder,
there may be familial transmission of a vulnerability

GOGNITlVE PROCESSING

for cognitive biases specific to that particular diagnostic domain. It is not clear from the data^, however, by
what means parents conveyed this vulnerability to their
children.
In the adult literature, state anxiety, stress, and other
transient v;uiables have been suggested as moderators
of the relation of trait anxiety to co,gnitive biases
(Broadbent. & Broadbent, 1988; MacLeold & Mathews,
1988; Mogg, Mathews, Bird, & Macgregor-Morris,
1990). Consistent with this evidence, it may be possible
that transitory influence from parents might similarly
affect processing phenomena in children. In particular,
the findings of Mathews d al. (1989) concerning irnplicit and explicit memory biases imply a possible
mechanism for parental influence. These findings suggested that cognitive structures related to1 threat may be
more easily or more continuously activated in anxious
individuals when primed by previous exposure to the
threatening stimulus word. It seems reasonable, then,
that anxious children may show increased threat activation on cognitive or interpretive tasks when previously
"primed" by anxious ideas from their parents.
The p q m s e of this study was to determine if interpretive biases associated with danger schemata are present in children and to ascertain whether the verbal
behavior of the family was a potential transient influence on these biases. The procedures entailed a modification of the ambiguous interpretive task introduced
by Butler and Mathews (1983) as well as its adaptation
for child an~dfamily assessment (Dadds et al., 1992). In
particular, it was hypothesized that trait anxiety would
be linearly relatad to the number of threatening interpretations, and avoidant plans as well as to the assignment of higher probability estimates to the occurrence
of threatening events and avoidant behavior. Regarding
the family effects, it was hypothesized that children
would demonstrate an increase in bias for threat on an
interpretive task when formerly primed by anxious
ideas in a discussion with parents.

Method
Participants
Clinical sample. To increase the range on measures of anxiety, four children with a diagnosis of an
anxiety disorder based on criteria in the third edition of
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) who
were between the ages of 9 and 13 and the parents of
each child were included in the study. Children with a
current major depressive episode or a diagnosis of
dysthymia, schizophrenia, pervasive developmental
disorder, organic brain syndrome, or mental retardation
were excluded from the sample.

The child and parent forms of the Anxiety Disorders

Interview Schedule folr Children (ADISI-C and
ADIS-P; Silverman, 1991; Silverman & Nelles, 1988)
was used to determine diagnosis of the clinically referred children. This instrument is a semistructured
clinical interview for parents and children that is specifically designed for diagnosis of childhood anxiety
disorders and that allows the clinician to rule out
alternative diagnoses such as mood or conduct disorders. This instrument has been shown to possess satisfactory reliability across a range of parameters and
ages (Silverman & Eisen, 1992). Interviews were conducted by a clinical child psychologist and by doctoral
students in clinical psychology who had been trained
to reliability using the ADIS-C and the ADIS-P and
who had a minimum of 1 year experience adirninistering the interview.

Nanclinirsl sample. Eight families were recruited through advertisementsfor a study of "children
and parents" posted in local rr~alls,stores, and offices.
Families of nonclinical children were offeredl $20 for
their participation, and the children in the nonclinical
sample each received a $2 gift certificate. The same
inclusionay age criterion (9 to 13 years) applied to
children in the nonclinical sample. All families who
responded to the advertisiernent agreed to participate.
For the combined sample, the mean age was 11.33years
(SD = 1.78), and 7 of the children were girls.
Procedure
All children and families in the study read and signed
informed consent and assent forms before starting the
procedure. Children in both groups were then administered the trait version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC; Spielberger, 1973). This was
followed by a brief individual interview, approximately
10 min long, during which each child was asked to
respond verbally to a questionnaire that required interpretation of four ambiguous si1:uations. This interview
was conducted by Bruce Chorpita for all participants.
During administration of the ambiguous-situations
questionnaire (ASQ), the situations and questialns were
read aloud to the child and recorded in writing by the
interviewer. Each of the four situations required the
child first to express a 111stof interpretations; of the
possible details surrounding the development or context of the situation. Next, the child was asked to
generate a list of plans for Ihow to behave or react to the
situation in question. Finally, lo determine which responses were assigned martimum probability, the child
was also asked to identify which interpretation and
which plan fiom the lists generated was felt to be most
likely for that situation. This involved the child selectively choosing one outcome and one plan of action to

CHORPITA, ALBANO, & BARLOW

represent what he or she believed would actually happen were that situation to occur.
Once the questionnaire task was complete, each
child was asked to discuss the same four situations,
one at a time, with his or her parents. Discussion of
each situation was given a maximum time limit of 10
min, for a total of 40 min maximum. In addition to
being observed, the family discussion of each of the
four questions was also videotaped. Following the
discussion portion of each of the four questions, the
child verbally responded to the same questions again
in a second individual interview. The task was identical to the first interview that had preceded the
family discussion.
This procedure was administered to the children in
both the anxious and nonanxious samples. The duration
of the entire process (first interview, discussion, and
second interview) was approximately 60 min total for
each participant. At the end of the hour, families were
debriefed, and questions were answered concerning the
meatling of the study.

Questionnaires

STAIC. The Trait version of the STAIC (Spielberger, 1973) is a 20-item self-report scale, similar in
conception to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger, Gorsuch, & Lushene, 1970). The STAIC Trait
scale was designed to assess "anxiety proneness" in
school- age children (Spielberger, 1973,p. 3). The items
describe presence or absence of anxiety symptoms and
are ranked in terms of their frequency of occurrence on
a scale rangihg from 1 (hardly ever) to 3 (often). The
means for a sample of 1,554elementary school children
were 36.7 for boys and 38.0 for girls, with standard
deviations of 6.32 and 6.68 respectively.
ASQ. Design of the ASQ was based on an elaboratinn and modification of the lists of situations used
by Dadds, Heard, and Rapee (1992) and Butler and
Mathews (1983). A list of 12 ambiguous situations was
constructed, some of which were drawn from previous
research, others designed by the experimenter to ap-

proximate a similar intent and degree of ambiguity.The

list was then read and refined by two advanced-level
graduate students working in the area of child anxiety,
to ensure age appropriateness, suitable ambiguity, and
diversity of content areas. To avoid problems of content
specificity, situations were also sorted according to
their content into groups representing social, physiological, separation, and general domains. The most
representative of each category was then selected by a
committee of three advanced-level graduate students
and three clinical child psychologists. The four resulting situations comprised the questionnaire (see Table
1).
The interpretive task was modified from that of
Dadds et al. (1992), in whbh each question required an
interpretation to be selected from a multiple choice of
four. For this study, a free-response technique was
employed; this was felt to have the least influence on
responses through suggestion. Unlike the free-response
technique of Butler and Mathews (1983), which allowed only one response per situation, the task in our
study encouraged children to generate as many ideas as
they reasonably could for each situation. This technique
was employed to ~ o n mfor
l pos~iblesocial desirability
effects discovered during a pilot administration of the
questionnaire using the single-response teohnique. It
was fouad that single responses for all children were
typically nonanxious and ,socially appmpriate in nature
and therefore did not dis4rirnEnate adequattdy btween
groups. With a multiple-aespbnse pr'ocdure, however,
this desirability effect was overcome and a high variability of respansle t y p ~ was
s obs~ed.
As in the study of Dadds et al. (IBW2),each quastion
required the child to @xpr:#ssa behavioral plan in addition to arl intcaqrbiltiah. The p w p ~ l ~was
d to provide
information about the possible relation af different
types of camitions in ambiguous situations and
whether cognitions re3ated to bshavioxi operated in synchrony with thasa m1&kdto idtarpretation.In additian,
a plan-expression task was felt to be a potential measure
of subjective avwion for a threatening outcome, with
the assumption bsing that high avmion should be
indicated by increased avoidance in the plans expressed.

Table 1. Ambiguous Situations, Example Responses, and ClassiJications

-

Situation
You see a group of students from another class
playing a great game. You walk over and want to
join in. As you get closer, you hear them laughing.
On the way to school you begin to feel fumy in
your stomach.
Your parent(%)go(es) out for the evening and leave
yod at home with a babysitter. It begins to get late,
and they are still not home.
You are in bed at night, and you hear a noise in the
hallway.

Example Response

Coded Value

They are laughing at me.

They are having fun.

Anxious interpretation
Nonanxious interpretation

I would go home.
I would wait to see if it got better.
I would call the police.
There was lots of traffic.

Anxious plan
Nonanxious plan
Anxious plan
Nonanxious interpretation

A robber.
The heater.

Anxious interpretation
Nonanxious interpretation

COGNITIVE PROCESSING

Coding
ASQ. Questionnaire responses were coded by
scoring all responses as either anxious aa nonanxious.
Rules for dliscriminating anxious and nonanxious responses were constructed by the experim~enter
based on
collection and examination of pilot data from children
with anxiety disorders using the same questionnaire. In
general, these rules classified as anxious; any interpretation or plan involving perceived threat or enduring
misfortune to self or others, or avoidance of such apparent threat or misfortune. Examples of children's
responses and their classifications are pr~esentedin Table 1. Two independent raters were brained by the
experiment~erusing pilot data until agreement reached
a minimum of 80%. Interrater agreement was then
checked based on random sampling of questionnaire
responses to determine reliabilities for the measures.
Cohen's kappa (Bartko & Carpenter, 1976) for interrater agreement on the questionnaires was .98, indicating excellent agreement beyond chanca. Both raters
were blind to trait anxiety scores and clinical status of
the children.
Videotape. The coding system used for the videotaped family discussions was adapted from that of
Dadds, Ryan, Barrett, and Rapee (1992). Training of
raters involved the same 80% agreement criterion as
with the questionnaire coding. Verbalizations were
coded into several content categories (e.g., interpretation, plan, description, question, agreement, or disagreement). In addition, the valence of each of these
utterances was coded as anxious or nonanxious (i.e.,
neutral). This system required both raters to code simultaneously, with the "lead" coder defining utterance
length (typiically one sentence) by pausing the tape.
Both raters would then independently c~odethe utterance. The kqppa coefficients for the coded variables
ranged from ,85 to .99 respectively, reflecting excellent agreement above chance. Again, both raters were
blind to trait anxiety scores and clinical status of the
children.

Posttest (I-PRE and I-POST) and Plan Index Retest and

Posttest (P-PRE and P-POST). Change scores for these
variables were calculated by subtracting polsttest indexes from pretest ones, and these were referred to as
Interpretation Change (IC) and Plan Change (PC).
Children's subjective prol~abilityassignment for
threatening interpretations was measured by the total
number of most likely interpretations (MLIs) coded as
anxious on each questionnaire administraticon. MLI
scores thus ranged from 0 to 4. Similarly, most likely
plans (MLPs) yielded an index of subjective probability
for anxious or avoidant plans. These variables were felt
to reflect somewhat different informationthan the overall ratio of anxious to nonanxious interpretations in that
they required a selection of only one possible outcome
and one possible plan.
The degree sf anxious family influence during the
intervening family discussion task was calc~~lated
by
taking the raiia of mother, father, and combined verbalizations coded as anxious interpretations, anxious
plans, anxious questions (i.e., a question that introduces a threat, such as "Might it be a rob be^:?')), and
agreements to those statements to the total number of
nonanxious statements. To correct for positive
skewness, these three ratios were transformred using
the natural logarithm function.The reeulting variables
were called the Mother Index (IvII), Father Index (FI),
and Combined Index (CI). Higher scores on these
variables indicated a relatively greater degree of anxious verbalization by the respective parent dllring the
discussion task.

Results
Trait Anxiety
Trait anxiety scores for the children in both samples obtained on the Trait Scale of the STAIC were
evenly distributed across the combined samlple. The
mean of the trait anxiety T scores for the combined
sample was 44.33 (SD = 12.33). Values are listed in
Table 2.

Dependent Variables

Analyses

Several dependent variables were calculated for the

purpows of the analyses using appropriate transformations (see Winer, Brown, & Michels, 1991). The main
variables of interest were indexes of interpretive style
and plan expression. These were calculated by first
obtaining the proportion of total responses scored as
anxious on the tasks for interpretation and for plan
expression ;and then transforming the two resulting
proportions using the arcsine function. Four indexes
resulted, refixred to as Interpretation Index Pretest and

The scores from the first task administratilon were

examined to test the hypothesis that high-anxious children would show a relative processing bias fo~rthreat.
Preceding the family discussi~on,there was ii strong
association between the I-PRE and trait anxiet,y scores
(r = .70, p < .01). A similar association was found
between the P-PRE and trait anxiety scores (r = .73, p
< .01).
To test the hypothesis that high-anxious children
would assign greater probability to threatening out-

CHORPITA, ALBANO, & BARLOW

comes and corresponding plans, responses expressing

MLI and MLP were examined from the first administration of the task. The MLI scores were significantly
correlated with trait anxiety scores at pretest (r = .59),
F(1, 10) = 5.33, p c .04, but not at posttest (r = .16),
F(1, 10) = .268, p c .62. Both MLP scores, however,
were significantly related to trait anxiety at pretest (r =
.74), F(l, 10)= 1 2 . 3 6 ,c~ .006, and at posttest (r= .70),
F(l, 10) = 9 . 8 3 ,<~ .01.
Following the family discussion, the Interpretation
Index no longer demonstrated a significant relation to
trait anxiety scores (r = .25, p < 44). The Plan Index,
however, remained strongly correlated with trait scores
(r = 32, p c .005).
Further examination was conducted to test the hypothesized influence of the family discussion task on
the Interpretation and Plan Indexes, as well as MLI and
MLP scores. Correlations were examined using the MI,
N, and CI with the Interpretation and Plan Change
scores. The correlations ciln be found in Table 3.
Althaugh there appeared to have been some change
in MLI scores from pretest to posttelit, no significant
correlations were found betwean MLI change scores
and the variables from the family discussion. MLP
change scores were dso uno-ofh?lated with the variables
from the discusision task.

Table 2. Sample Characteristics

Participant
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

11
12

Diagnosisa
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Separation anxiety disorder
Social phobia
Nonclinical
Nonclinical
Nonclinical
Panic disorder with agoraphobia
Nonclinical
Nonclinical
Nonclinical
Nonclinical
Nonclinical

STAIC
T Score
43
47
23

30
27
34
41
36
34
28
24
34

aNonclinical children were not assessed with a diagnostic interview.

Table 3. Correlations of Interpretation and Plan

Change Scores With Variables From the
Family Discussion Task
Index
Mother
Father
Combined
* p < .05.

Interpretation Change

Plan Change

.36
.47

.61Y
.70Y
.37

.2 1

Discussion
Albeit preliminary, these results represent some of
the earliest findings concerning the nature of cognitive
processing among anxious children, particularly with
their relation to the dimension of trait anxiety. Although
the results are consistent with present theorizing on
cognitive biases related to anxiety, it should be cautioned that the low statisticalpower in this study limited
the ability to examine the data in the most conservative
manner. Sufficient elaboration of these informationprocessing phenomena will undoubtedly benefit from
careful replication.
The data support several of the original hypotheses
and suggest that higher trait-anxious children may indeed have a heightened tendency to interpret ambiguous material as threatening, to express avoidant plans
when faced with ambiguity, and to assign higher probability to the occurrence of threatening events. The
evidence indicates the presence of bias pheoomenathat
are similar to those found in anxious adults (e.g., Butler
& Mathews, 1983,1987; Eysemket al., 1987;Mathews
et al., 1989).
The relation of the observed biases to trait anxiety
was found to be considerably stronger than similar
associations demonstrated in the adult literature (e-g.,
Broadbent & Broadbent, 1988).Some of the magnitude
of the correlation may be due to the increased rmge of
trait anxiety from our having used a mixed sample; and
clearly, the confidence intervalsgiven our smaLl ample
suggest one would expect some attenuation when replicating with a larger group, Nevertheless, the preliminary correlationswe nated are striking.Whereas Brodbent and Broadbent (1988)had estimatedthe pvopolition
of variance accounted for to be somewherebetwleen .06
and .07 for adults, the current sample exhibitedaqumed
correlation coefficien as high as .49 and 3 3 .
The data from the family discussion suggest that
cognitive biases in an&iouschildren are poa$bly open
to the influenceof theirparen&'verbalizatilons,Specifically, the degree of anxious expression by partents was
uniformly related to change scores on both tb@interpretation and plan indexes. Interestingly, the ffithers' verbalizations seemed to account for more of the effect
than those of the mothers. However, the low experimental power as well as issues of measurememt e m r limit
the interpretability of these findings somewhat. Although the comlations were all in the expwltad direction and ware of clinically si@$Sioant magditude, only
two of the six were signilcsmt: at ,OS (see Tabla 3).
The data concerning probability assign;ment for
threatening Qutcome wbre Qbnsistent wk& the other
findings, indicating increased parceived pdbfibility related to hi@ trait anxiety. Ik&aifi, thesk hhisults are
consistent with the findings of Buder and Mathews
(1983), who demansttxtsd ~ixrlilarpr~bgbllitybiases
$attern of
among advltrs With amiety. h additiafi,

COGNITIVE PROCESSING

findings concerning parental influence on probability

assignment matched the interpretation and plan expression data. That is, high probability assignment for
threatening outcomes was significantly related to trait
anxiety before the family discussion, but not after. The
pattern suggests that some variable during the discussion impacted probability assignment. The effect size
was not large enough to identify the fanlily influence
as significantly related to these criteria; however, it
seems likely that the change would be related in some
way to the content of the family discussion. A larger
sample size, as well as more refined analysis of the
discussion content, would be necessary to confirm
these hypotheses.
Interestingly, it was noted that, at times, low-anxious
children (i.e:., those scoring below the group mean on
the STAIC) did not express avoidant plans despite
expressing a high degree of threatening interpretations.
In contrast, threatening interpretations of high-anxious
children were almost always accompanied by avoidant
plans. One iimplicationis that low-anxious children may
simply be more tolerant of situations they have identified as threatening. This outcome parallels the findings
of Butler and Mathews (1983), who demonstrated increased subjective ratings of cost for threatening outcomes among high-anxious individuals. Indeed, lowanxious children may differ from high-anxious children
not simply c:ognitively, but also in the degree to which
their cognitions impact or relate to behavioral plans.
This potential response synchrony among high-anxious
children would seem a critical process in the etiology
of pathological anxiety and learned avoidance, and
there is undoubtedly a need for more cmful attention
to the nature: of such patterns in future studies.
Despite a limited sample size, the overall implications of the data are encouraging.It seems that cognitive
biases related to trait anxiety might exist among children, and that, as demonstrated by Barrett et al. (1993),
these biases may be sensitive to influence from parents.
Continued investigation will need to explore more details of cognitive phenomena, including the presence of
attentional or memory biases, specificity of biases, and
the relation of cognitive processes to pathology. It
would be fruitful to conduct a more thorough investigation of the relation of possible attention and interpretive biases to a broader cognitive-affectiveprocess, as
has been outlined in adult anxiety (Barlow, 1988).
Furthermore, there is a need to assess whether such
phenomena are specific to anxiety or part of a more
general negative affectivity. Equally important, the dynamics of the family will need to be better understood
in terms of ]more global constructs to identify which
variables might contribute to the transmission of anxiety. Family cohesion, marital adjustment, nonverbal
interactions, and parents' anxiety are only a few of the
potentially relevant influences on the processes outlined thus far. The pursuit of such questioris likely will

be instrumental in the theoretical advancement of our

understanding of childhood anxiety.

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CHORPITA, ALBANO, & BARLOW

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Received June 22, 1994

Final revision received April 26, 1995