The present study examined the cognitive inhibition hypothesis (Kindt, Bierman, & Brosschot, 1997) which asserts that young children lack the ability to inhibit the processing of threat, but develop this with age. To examine this issue, high spider fearful children (N = 170) and low spider fearful children (N = 215) aged 7—11 years were tested by means of an emotional Stroop task. It was hypothesised that a processing bias for spider-related stimuli would be present in all 8- and 9-year-old children. That is, it was expected that responses to spider words would be slower compared to responses to control words. Furthermore, it was hypothesised that this processing bias would decrease with age in low fearful children, whereas it would persist in high fearful children. No support was found for these hypotheses. Instead of the predicted processing bias, data showed the reverse pattern; that is, children responded faster to spider words compared to control words. It is proposed that the reverse bias results from avoidance. More precisely, children may evade the processing of spider stimuli through fast responding.

The present study examined processing bias in children suffering from anxiety disorders. Processing bias was assessed using of the emotional Stroop task in clinically referred children with separation anxiety disorder (SAD), social phobia (SP), and/or generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and normal controls. The aims of the present study were twofold: (a) to test whether clinically anxious children show a bias towards threat stimuli, and (b) to examine whether this bias is domain-specific. No evidence was obtained for either an anxiety-related bias towards threat, or a domain-specificity effect. Clearly, these findings diverge markedly from adult studies and stress the importance of further research on anxiety-related information processing in children.

The present study examined the relationship between anxiety and depression, on the one hand, and reduced evidence for danger (RED) bias and other threat perception abnormalities, on the other hand. A nonclinical sample of school children (N = 138) completed a brief measure of childhood anxiety and depression symptoms and were then exposed to a series of pictures taken from projective tests. Results showed that (a) anxiety was accompanied by RED bias and other threat perception abnormalities, (b) depression was less convincingly associated with such cognitive distortions, and (c) anxiety-related threat perception abnormalities were not merely the result of a stronger tendency to give affirmative responses. The role of threat perception abnormalities in the pathogenesis of childhood anxiety as well as the clinical implications of these cognitive phenomena are briefly discussed.

The present study investigated whether children with high symptom levels of either social phobia (SP), separation anxiety disorder (SAD), or generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) are characterised by a specific set of dysfunctional interpretations that are consistent with the cognitive model of their specific fear (“content-specificity of interpretations”). It was also examined whether such cognitive bias is predominantly activated in those ambiguous situations that are relevant for the pertinent fear (“content-specificity of situations”). Children high on symptoms of SP, SAD, and GAD and low-anxious control children were exposed to stories describing ambiguous situations and asked to give their interpretations and action plans. Results showed that high-anxious children displayed a negative cognitive bias compared to control children, but did not differ from controls with respect to the action plans given. Some evidence was found for the content-specificity of this cognitive bias. That is, consistent with the hypothesis of content-specificity of interpretations, children high on SAD reported more interpretations consistent with the content of their fear than children high on SP and GAD. Further, children high on SP and SAD predominantly displayed a negative cognitive bias in response to respectively social and separation situations. Children high on GAD did not show content-specificity for interpretations or situations. The theoretical implications of these findings are briefly discussed.