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Child Anxiety and the Processing of Ambiguity

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Abstract

An association between interpretation of ambiguity and anxiety may exist in children, but findings have been equivocal. The present research utilized the Interpretation Generation Questionnaire for Children (IGQ-C), a novel measure that breaks down the processing of ambiguity into three steps: the generation of possible interpretations, the selection of the most likely interpretation and the anticipated emotional response to the ambiguous situation. The IGQ-C was completed by 103 children aged 11–12 years, 28 of whom had a clinical anxiety disorder. There was some evidence for an association between anxiety and: (1) the generation of initial negative interpretations; (2) the generation of a greater number of negative interpretations overall; and (3) the selection of negative responses. These findings were not consistent across measures of anxiety. A more convincing association was found between child anxiety and anticipated emotional response to the ambiguous scenarios, with anxious children anticipating more negative emotion.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Emily Ramsay, Margie Brammall, Veronica Engel, Kerrie Lam and Amy He for their help with initial data collection and Catia Malvaso for her assistance with reliability coding. Thank you also to the families who so generously give their time to support research.

Conflict of Interest

Helen Dodd, Jennifer Hudson, Suzannah Ravenscroft and Talia Morris declare that they have no conflict of interest. This project was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council (DP1095162, DP0878609) to Jennifer Hudson. The data have not been presented or published previously.

Informed Consent

Macquarie University Human Ethics Committee approved the methods of the study and all procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments. Parents provided informed consent on behalf of their children and children provided verbal assent after the study procedures had been explained to them.

Animal Rights

No animal studies were carried out by the authors for this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Harry Pitt Building, Earley Gate, Whiteknights Road, Reading, RG6 6AL, UK

    Helen F. Dodd & Suzannah Stuijfzand

  2. Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Helen F. Dodd

  3. Centre for Emotional Health, Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Talia Morris & Jennifer L. Hudson

Authors
  1. Helen F. Dodd
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  2. Suzannah Stuijfzand
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  3. Talia Morris
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  4. Jennifer L. Hudson
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Correspondence to Helen F. Dodd.

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Dodd, H.F., Stuijfzand, S., Morris, T. et al. Child Anxiety and the Processing of Ambiguity. Cogn Ther Res 39, 669–677 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-015-9689-1

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