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Children’s Negative Cognitive Error Questionnaire—Revised: The Factor Structure and Associations with Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms Across Age, Gender, and Clinical/Community Samples

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Abstract

This study evaluated the factor structure of the Children’s Negative Cognitive Error Questionnaire—Revised (CNCEQ-R) and its relationship with anxiety and depressive symptoms. The study included a community sample of 257 children and adolescents and a clinical sample of 201 referred youths, aged 9–18 years. Participants completed the CNCEQ-R and the revised child anxiety and depression scale (RCADS). For the original five-factor model, confirmatory factor analysis indicated an overall good fit to the data for the entire sample. The model was found fully invariant between boys and girls, children and adolescents, and clinically-referred and non-referred youths. The cognitive error of “overgeneralizing” accounted for most of the variance in depressive symptoms (15 %), while “mind reading” accounted for most of the variance in anxiety symptoms (20 %). The CNCEQ-R total score was significantly higher in youth with depression only than in youth with other disorders.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank to Edwin Chin for the English editing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Clinic for Neurology and Psychiatry for Children and Youth, Belgrade, Serbia

    Dejan Stevanovic, Vladimir Jovic, Slavica Brkic-Cvetkovic & Jasna Jancic

  2. Laboratory for Neurocognition and Applied Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia

    Bojan Lalic & Jelena Batinic

  3. Faculty of Education, Sombor, Serbia

    Rade Damjanovic

Authors
  1. Dejan Stevanovic
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  2. Bojan Lalic
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  3. Jelena Batinic
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  4. Rade Damjanovic
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  5. Vladimir Jovic
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  6. Slavica Brkic-Cvetkovic
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Correspondence to Dejan Stevanovic.

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Conflict of Interest

Author Dejan Stevanovic, Author Bojan Lalic, Author Jelena Batinic, Author Rade Damjanovic, Author Vladimir Jovic, and Author Slavica Brkic-Cvetkovic declare that they have no conflict of interest. Author Jasna Jancic received research grant support from the Ministry of Education and Science, Republic of Serbia (Project No. 175031), which is unrelated to this study.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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All institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed.

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Stevanovic, D., Lalic, B., Batinic, J. et al. Children’s Negative Cognitive Error Questionnaire—Revised: The Factor Structure and Associations with Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms Across Age, Gender, and Clinical/Community Samples. Cogn Ther Res 40, 584–592 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-016-9767-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-016-9767-z

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