Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Anxiety and its disorders in children and adolescents before the twentieth century
- 2 Affective and cognitive processes and the development and maintenance of anxiety and its disorders
- 3 Behavioural inhibition and the development of childhood anxiety disorders
- 4 Psychosocial developmental theory in relation to anxiety and its disorders
- 5 Neuropsychiatry of paediatric anxiety disorders
- 6 Clinical phenomenology, classification and assessment of anxiety disorders in children and adolescents
- 7 Friends or foes? Peer influences on anxiety among children and adolescents
- 8 Conditioning models of childhood anxiety
- 9 Traumatic events and post-traumatic stress disorder
- 10 Family and genetic influences: is anxiety ‘all in the family’?
- 11 Child–parent relations: attachment and anxiety disorders
- 12 Community and epidemiological aspects of anxiety disorders in children
- 13 Onset, course, and outcome for anxiety disorders in children
- 14 Psychosocial interventions for anxiety disorders in children: status and future directions
- 15 Pharmacological treatment of paediatric anxiety
- 16 Prevention of anxiety disorders: the case of post-traumatic stress disorder
- Index
2 - Affective and cognitive processes and the development and maintenance of anxiety and its disorders
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Anxiety and its disorders in children and adolescents before the twentieth century
- 2 Affective and cognitive processes and the development and maintenance of anxiety and its disorders
- 3 Behavioural inhibition and the development of childhood anxiety disorders
- 4 Psychosocial developmental theory in relation to anxiety and its disorders
- 5 Neuropsychiatry of paediatric anxiety disorders
- 6 Clinical phenomenology, classification and assessment of anxiety disorders in children and adolescents
- 7 Friends or foes? Peer influences on anxiety among children and adolescents
- 8 Conditioning models of childhood anxiety
- 9 Traumatic events and post-traumatic stress disorder
- 10 Family and genetic influences: is anxiety ‘all in the family’?
- 11 Child–parent relations: attachment and anxiety disorders
- 12 Community and epidemiological aspects of anxiety disorders in children
- 13 Onset, course, and outcome for anxiety disorders in children
- 14 Psychosocial interventions for anxiety disorders in children: status and future directions
- 15 Pharmacological treatment of paediatric anxiety
- 16 Prevention of anxiety disorders: the case of post-traumatic stress disorder
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The cognitive view of childhood anxiety assumes that anxiety is mediated by distorted and maladaptive cognition. Although research examining these cognitive mediational processes in children is limited, the evidence that childhood anxiety is associated with distorted cognition is growing. Cognitive variables thought to be involved in the development and maintenance of anxiety include negative cognition, worrying, causal attributions and biased attention and memory processes. The majority of studies on cognition and childhood anxiety has focused on the valence and content of cognition.
Several reviews of the research literature concluded nearly a decade ago that the understanding of cognitive disturbances in anxious children was limited and only beginning to emerge (Francis, 1988; Kendall & Chansky, 1991). Particularly, three issues were then considered to be in need of increased research attention: the cognitions of clinically anxious children, a comparative analysis of cognitive assessment measures and cognitive coding systems, and the relationship of anxious children's cognitions to adaptive and maladaptive functioning. The past years have witnessed an increase in research attention with respect to these issues.
Although childhood anxiety researchers have begun to document the importance of cognitive factors in understanding and treating childhood anxiety disorders (Kendall, 1994; Vasey & Daleiden, 1996), the level of complexity apparent in adult models (see Mathews & MacLeod, 1994) remains lacking in the child domain. Moreover, much of the existing theorizing is extended from clinical and experimental observations with adults, such as Beck's cognitive theory of anxiety.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Anxiety Disorders in Children and AdolescentsResearch, Assessment and Intervention, pp. 23 - 44Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000