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Mom told me scary things about this animal: Parents installing fear beliefs in their children via the verbal information pathway
Behaviour Research and Therapy 48 (2010) 341–346
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Mom told me scary things about this animal: Parents installing fear beliefs in their children via the verbal information pathway Peter Muris*, Lisanne van Zwol, Jorg Huijding, Birgit Mayer Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 19 May 2009 Received in revised form 9 October 2009 Accepted 1 December 2009
This study investigated whether fear beliefs can be installed in children after parents had received negatively tinted information about a novel stimulus. Parents of children aged 8–13 years (N ¼ 88) were presented with negative, positive, or ambiguous information about an unknown animal and then given a number of open-ended vignettes describing confrontations with the animal with the instruction to tell their children what would happen in these situations. Results indicated that children’s fear beliefs were influenced by the information that was provided to the parent. That is, parents who had received negative information provided more threatening narratives about the animal and hence installed higher levels of fear beliefs in their children than parents who had received positive information. In the case of ambiguous information, the transmission of fear was dependent on parents’ trait anxiety levels. More precisely, high trait anxious parents told more negative stories about the unknown animal, which produced higher fear levels in children. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Fear Children Verbal information Parents
Introduction Fear, anxiety, and their disorders run in families (Rapee, Schniering, & Hudson, 2009). On the one hand, this familial aggregation can be explained in terms of heredity. For instance, in their summary of the behavior genetics literature, Eley and Gregory (2004) conclude that genetic influences account for up to 50% of the variance in childhood anxiety phenomena. On the other hand, family processes also seem to play a role in the transfer of fear and anxiety from parents to children. Bo¨gels and Brechman-Toussaint (2006) concluded that there is clear support for associations between family factors such as insecure attachment and overprotective parenting and child anxiety, but also made a more critical note that the evidence for these relationships is predominantly cross-sectional and that further research on the mechanisms mediating these relationships is certainly required. One mechanism that may be important in the transfer of fear and anxiety from parents to children is verbal information transmission. That is, children may become fearful and anxious when they hear that a stimulus or situation might be dangerous or have another negative connotation (Rachman, 1977). In the past years,
* Corresponding author. Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, Suite T13-37, Postbus 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Tel.: þ31 10 408 8706; fax: þ31 10 408 9009. E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Muris). 0005-7967/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2009.12.001
a series of experimental studies have shown that negative information enhances children’s fear reactions towards unknown stimuli (Muris & Field, submitted for publication). However, in spite of Rachman’s (1977) notion that ‘‘information-giving is an inherent part of child-rearing and is carried on by parents in an almost unceasing fashion, particularly in the child’s earliest years’’ and that ‘‘it is probable that informational and instructional processes provide the basis for most of our commonly encountered fears of everyday life’’ (p. 384), no investigation can be found that directly examined the role of verbal information as provided by parents on children’s fear and anxiety levels. A study that could nevertheless be mentioned in this respect is that by Barrett, Rapee, Dadds, and Ryan (1996) who examined family influences on interpretation bias in anxious and aggressive children. The results showed that family discussions of ambiguous scenarios enhanced children’s cognitive bias, with anxious youths specifically displaying an increase in avoidant responses. Although these findings indicated that an interpretation bias in children can be passed on from parents to their children, it remains unclear what mechanism was responsible for the transfer of this anxiety-related cognitive distortion. One possibility is that the interpretation bias was installed by parents who due to their own anxiety frequently provided negative information about the ambiguous situations to their children. The present investigation provides a direct test of the role of negative information in the transfer of fear and anxiety from parents to their children. An experiment was carried out in which
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parents were presented with a novel animal (i.e., an Australian marsupial) about which they received negative, positive, or ambiguous information. Parents were incited to pass this information on to their offspring by asking them to describe a series of imaginary confrontations with the animal. The main hypothesis of the study was that children’s fear of the animal would change as a function of the information provided to the parents. More precisely, parents in the negative information condition were hypothesized to describe the confrontations with the novel animal in a more negative way, thereby producing higher levels of fear in their children. In contrast, parents in the positive information condition were predicted to tell fairly positive stories about the animal, which in turn would result in lower fear levels in their children. No clear-cut fear-enhancing or fear-reducing effects were expected to be observed in the offspring of parents in the ambiguous information condition. Nevertheless, this condition had our special interest as it may well be the case that parents’ descriptions of the confrontations with the animals in this condition would be dependent on their own habitual anxiety levels (Gallagher & Cartwright-Hatton, 2009) or anxious rearing style (Whaley, Pinto, & Sigman, 1999). That is, high trait anxious parents and/or parents who tend to display anxious rearing behaviors may be more inclined to translate the ambiguous information in more negative stories about the novel animal and hence are more likely to install fear in their children. Method Participants Children were recruited from three primary schools in Spijkenisse, The Netherlands. Two-hundred-and-thirteen children and parents were invited to participate by sending them a letter with information about the study, along with a consent form. Ninety children and parents responded positively to this invitation, which means that the response rate was 42.3%. During the course of the study, two child/parent pairs refrained from participation. Thus, the final sample consisted of 88 children (46 boys and 42 girls) who had a mean age of 10.28 years (SD ¼ 1.07, range 8–13 years). There were 72 mothers and 16 fathers who participated in the experiment. Parents had a mean age of 40.42 years (SD ¼ 5.06, range 21–53 years). The vast majority of the children and parents (i.e., >80%) were from original Dutch descent. Other children/parents had a Surinam, Antillean, Chinese, Moroccan, Turkish, or African background. The research project was officially approved by the Ethical Committee of Psychological Research of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Material and information A detailed black-and-white drawing printed on an A4-paper was used to show children what a Cuscus looks like (Appendix A). None of the children and parents had ever heard of this Australian marsupial prior to the experiment. The information about the Cuscus that was given to the parents consisted of 10 sentences that were provided in three versions: negative, ambiguous, and positive (Appendix B). Sentences were matched for content and word frequency (Center for Lexical Information, 1993). Further, three independent raters (psychologists) and three children were asked to classify each sentence as negative, ambiguous, or positive. Percentages of correct classification were high (i.e., 90–100%; Muris et al., 2009), indicating that the information provided about the Cuscus indeed differed across the three conditions.
Child assessment The Fear Beliefs Questionnaire (FBQ; Field, Argyris, & Knowles, 2001) consisted of 10 items (e.g., ‘‘Would you find it scary to touch a Cuscus?’’), which have to be rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 ¼ No, not at all to 5 ¼ Yes, definitely. A total fear belief score is computed by summing the ratings on all items (range 10–50). Cronbach’s alphas of the FBQ in the present study were 0.81 at the pre-test and 0.93 at the post-test assessment, which is well in line with previous studies demonstrating that this scale provides a reliable index of fear beliefs (Field et al., 2001; Muris et al., 2009). Children’s general levels of fearfulness were measured with a shortened version of the Fear Survey Schedule for ChildrenRevised (FSSC-R; Ollendick, 1983). This questionnaire consists of 25 items that are scored on a three-point scale with 1 ¼ No fear, 2 ¼ Some fear, and 3 ¼ A lot of fear. A total score (Cronbach’s alpha ¼ 0.81) can be obtained by summing across all items (range 25–75). The short version of the FSSC-R correlates 0.97 with the full-length scale, which has been shown to be a reliable and valid index of childhood fear (e.g., Muris, Merckelbach, Ollendick, King, & Bogie, 2002). The anxious rearing subscale of the Modified EMBU (Egna Minnen Betraffende Uppfostran which is Swedish for ‘My memories of Upbringing’; Castro, Toro, Van der Ende, & Arrindell, 1993) for Children (EMBU-C) consists of 10 items that measure children’s perceptions of cautious, fearful, and worrisome parenting behaviors. Items such as ‘‘Your parents warn you of all possible dangers’’ have to be rated on a 4-point Likert scale with 1 ¼ No, never, 2 ¼ Yes, but seldom, 3 ¼ Yes, often, 4 ¼ Yes, most of the time. A psychometric evaluation of the EMBU-C has shown that this scale is reliable in terms of internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha ¼ 0.79; in the current study, alpha was 0.60) and test-retest stability (r ¼ 0.81), and correlates significantly with childhood anxiety symptoms (Muris, Meesters, & Van Brakel, 2003). Parent assessment Trait anxiety in the parents was measured by means of the Y2version of Spielberger’s (1983) State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). This widely employed self-report scale consists of 20 items that assess how respondents feel ‘‘generally’’. A total score (Cronbach’s alpha ¼ 0.92) can be obtained (range 20–80), with higher scores being indicative for higher levels of trait anxiety. There is clear support for the psychometric qualities of the STAI (Spielberger, 1983). Procedure The assessment consisted of two sessions which were both carried out by one and the same experimenter. The first assessment session took place in children’s classroom at school. Children began with completing the shortened FSSC-R and then were given an A4sheet with a picture of the Cuscus and asked to complete the FBQ for this animal, although they did not really know anything about its life style (i.e., pre-information FBQ). The second assessment session occurred at children’s home and took place within 2–3 weeks after the initial assessment. The home session, during which the child and only one of the parents were present, started by showing parents the picture of the Cuscus and giving them a small card with 10 sentences of information about this animal, which were dependent on the information condition (i.e., negative, positive, and ambiguous) they had been randomly assigned to. They were asked to read the sentences silently and to form themselves a picture of what the Cuscus was like. As a manipulation check,
P. Muris et al. / Behaviour Research and Therapy 48 (2010) 341–346
parents completed two items ‘‘The Cuscus is a kind animal’’ and ‘‘The Cuscus is scary’’ that had to be answered on 10-point Likert scales with 1 ¼ Not at all true and 10 ¼ Very true. In the meantime, children were asked to complete the anxious rearing subscale of the Modified EMBU-C. Following this, parents were given four brief vignettes describing a series of confrontations with the animal (i.e., ‘‘The Cuscus encounters another animal’’, ‘‘Your child asks whether he/ she can have a Cuscus for his/her birthday’’, ‘‘You have to clean the cage of a Cuscus’’, ‘‘Your child is playing in the park and then a Cuscus approaches’’) with the instruction to tell their children what would happen in these situations. They were explicitly told that they were allowed to use the information that they had been reading on the card, but also that they could add their own information based on the picture that they had formed of the animal. For each of the vignettes, parents were asked to tell their child what would happen in that situation, while children were instructed to just listen carefully so that they would learn more about the Cuscus. All the narratives that were told by the parents were taped by means of an audio recorder, and than scored by a blind rater who counted the number of words for each of the narratives and, most importantly, the number of negative statements that the parent made about the Cuscus. A second independent and blind rater did the same for the narratives of 30 randomly selected children, and in this way it was established that the inter-rater reliability for this ‘negative statements about the Cuscus’ variable was high (r ¼ 0.97). Finally, parents were asked to complete the trait anxiety version of the STAI, while children filled out the FBQ for the second time (i.e., post-information FBQ). Then, children and parents were debriefed, they were provided with some real information about the Cuscus, and children received a small present in return for their participation in the study. Results Pre-experimental comparisons Table 1 displays the general characteristics of children and parents in various verbal information groups. A series of one-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) and Chi square tests revealed no significant between-group differences, and so it can be concluded that the three randomly created groups were highly comparable in terms of demographic characteristics and other important variables such as children’s fear and parents’ trait anxiety and anxious rearing.
Table 1 General characteristics (frequencies or means with standard deviations) of children and parents in the three verbal information groups. Negative
Ambiguous
Positive
N
29
30
29
Children Sex (boys/girls) Mean age Ethnicity (Dutch/non-Dutch) Fearfulness (FSSC-R) Anxious rearing (EMBU-C)
14/15 10.31 (1.11) 20/9 38.93 (5.52) 20.31 (3.41)
16/14 10.17 (1.05) 23/7 40.63 (7.05) 20.07 (3.05)
16/13 10.28 (1.00) 23/6 38.90 (6.55) 20.59 (3.64)
Parents Sex (mothers/fathers) Mean age Ethnicity (Dutch/non-Dutch) Trait anxiety (STAI)
22/7 39.93 (6.02) 23/6 35.00 (7.48)
27/3 40.10 (5.23) 26/4 36.83 (10.56)
23/6 41.24 (3.73) 25/4 32.93 (8.89)
Note. FSSC-R ¼ Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised, STAI ¼ State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, EMBU-C ¼ Egna Minnen Betraffende Uppfostran (My Memories of Upbringing) for Children.
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Effects of information on parents’ evaluation and narratives of the animal Parents in the three verbal information groups received differential information about the Cuscus. To study the effects of this experimental manipulation, ANCOVAs (with trait anxiety as covariate) were carried out on parents’ ratings of the kindness and scariness of this animal. As shown in Table 2, parents who had received positive information clearly evaluated the Cuscus as more kind than parents who were given negative information, while parents who had been presented with ambiguous information scored in between [F(2,84) ¼ 41.09, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.49]. Further, parents who were presented with negative information rated the Cuscus as significantly more scary than the parents in the ambiguous and positive information groups [F(2,84) ¼ 32.86, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.44]. An ANCOVA performed on the total number of words in response to the four vignettes indicated that parents who had received the ambiguous information about the Cuscus told somewhat longer narratives to their children than parents had been given the positive information [F(2,84) ¼ 3.60, p < 0.05, partial h2 ¼ 0.08]. More importantly, it was found that parents in the negative information condition made clearly more negative statements about the Cuscus in their accounts to the children than parents in the ambiguous information condition, who in turn made significantly more negative remarks about this animal than the parents in the positive information condition [F(2,84) ¼ 138.53, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.77; see Table 2]. This analysis also revealed a significant main effect of the covariate trait anxiety [F(1,84) ¼ 8.89, p < 0.01, partial h2 ¼ 0.10]: higher levels of parents’ trait anxiety were associated with a higher frequency of negative statements about the Cuscus during narratives to the children. Altogether, these data demonstrate that the information given to the parents changed their evaluation of the Cuscus and instigated them to tell differentially valenced narratives to their children.
Effects on children’s fear beliefs Fig. 1 shows children’s mean fear beliefs scores in relation to the Cuscus before and after listening to the narratives told by their parents who had been provided with either negative, ambiguous, or positive information about this novel animal. A 3 (groups) 2 (sex) 2 (occasions: pre-test vs. post-test) ANCOVA, with the last factor being a repeated measure and FSSC-R general fearfulness scores as the covariate, yielded the crucial interaction effect of groups and occasions [F(2,81) ¼ 33.39, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.45].
Table 2 Mean scores (standard deviations) on the rating scales and negative statements score as derived from the narratives of the novel animal for parents in the three verbal information groups.
N Rating scales Kindness of the Cuscus Scariness of the Cuscus
Negative
Ambiguous
Positive
29
30
29
2.90 (2.82)a 6.69 (3.25)a
6.40 (2.21)b 2.80 (2.07)b
8.41 (1.84)c 1.83 (1.65)b
Narratives told to children Total number of words 465.72 (184.32)a,b 493.97 (170.81)a 384.55 (110.02)b Negative statements 21.90 (7.29)a 4.23 (5.92)b 0.45 (0.91)c about Cuscus Note. Means with different subscripts differ at p < 0.05 as determined by means of Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc tests.
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40
35
30 Negative 25
Ambiguous Positive
20
15
10 Pre-test
Post-test
Fig. 1. Graph showing children’s mean fear beliefs scores (standard errors) in relation to the Cuscus before and after listening to narratives of their parents who had been provided with either negative, ambiguous, or positive information about this novel animal.
trait anxiety/anxious rearing and the increase in children’s fear beliefs. For this purpose, Baron and Kenny’s (1986) four steps approach for testing mediation effects was utilized. Regression analyses with parental trait anxiety as the predictor variable revealed that the standardized b’s for the relations among parental trait anxiety, negative statements, and increase in children’s fear beliefs were all positive and significant (all b’s between 0.51 and 0.64, p’s < 0.01). Further, it was found that the relationship between parental trait anxiety and children’s fear beliefs (b ¼ 0.51, p < 0.01) clearly attenuated and was no longer significant when the mediator ‘negative statements’ was entered into the equation (b ¼ 0.13, p ¼ 0.48; Fig. 2-A). A Sobel (1982) test confirmed that the mediation effect of negative statements on the link between parental trait anxiety and children’s fear beliefs was indeed significant (Z ¼ 2.15, p < 0.05). The analyses with anxious rearing as the predictor yielded no evidence for the hypothesized mediation effect. More precisely, the relation between this parenting variable and the mediator of ‘negative self-statements’ was not significant (b ¼ 0.18, p ¼ 0.35) and so one of the basic conditions for mediation was not met. Nevertheless, it was found that anxious rearing had
A Further analysis indicated that the fear beliefs of children in various information groups did not differ at the beginning of the experiment [F(2,81) < 1], but were clearly diverging after children had listened to their parents’ narratives about the Cuscus [F(2,81) ¼ 44.58, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.52]. Bonferroni-corrected between- and within-group comparisons revealed that (1) fear beliefs increased from pre- to post-test in children of parents who had received negative information and decreased in children of parents who had been provided with positive information (both p’s < 0.001), whereas those in children of parents who were exposed to ambiguous information did not change (p ¼ 1.00), and (2) at post-test, children in the negative information group displayed higher levels of fear beliefs than children in the ambiguous information group, who in turn exhibited higher fear levels than children in the positive information group (all p’s < 0.001). In other words, it can be concluded that children’s fear beliefs of a novel animal were affected by the type of information they received from their parents.
Negative statements Parent
0.64**
Trait anxiety
0.59** 0.13 (0.51**)
Parent
↑ Fear beliefs Child
R 2 = 0.47
B Negative statements Parent
0.62**
Anxious rearing
0.32*
Parent
↑ Fear beliefs Child 2
R = 0.55 Parent variables that influence the verbal information pathway To examine the relations between parent variables and the installation of fear in children via verbal information, Pearson correlations were computed between the parent variables of trait anxiety (STAI), anxious rearing (EMBU-C), negative statements (as derived from parents’ narratives about the Cuscus), and the increase in fear beliefs (i.e., FBQ post-test minus FBQ pre-test) for children in the ambiguous information condition.1 The results demonstrated that there were positive and significant correlations between trait anxiety, anxious rearing, and negative statements on the one hand, and the increase of children’s fear beliefs, on the other hand (r’s being 0.51, 0.43, and 0.68, respectively, all p’s < 0.05). Regression analysis was used to examine whether negative statements acted as a mediator in the relation between parental
1 In the negative and positive information conditions, such an analysis was not viable because the verbal information provided in these conditions fully overruled the influence of the parental variables.
C Negative statements Parent
0.64**
Trait anxiety
0.58** 0.07 (0.43**)
Parent
↑ Fear beliefs Child
R 2 = 0.56 Anxious rearing
0.31* (0.33*)
Parent
Fig. 2. Schematic overview of the results as obtained with regression analyses predicting the increase in fear beliefs of children for whom parents had received ambiguous information about the novel animal. Model A: Parental trait anxiety as predictor. Model B: Anxious rearing as predictor. Model C: Both parental trait anxiety and anxious rearing as predictors. Standardized b’s are reported for each of the paths. To display effects of mediation, pre-mediator standardized b’s are shown in parentheses. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.
P. Muris et al. / Behaviour Research and Therapy 48 (2010) 341–346
a significant direct effect on the increase in children’s fear beliefs (b ¼ 0.32, p < 0.01; Fig. 2-B). A joint regression analysis in which trait anxiety and anxious rearing were simultaneously entered as predictors revealed that both parental factors made unique and significant contributions to children’s fear beliefs. As shown in Fig. 2-C, the influence of trait anxiety on the increase in children’s fear beliefs was fully mediated by the negative statements variable (which was entered subsequently in the regression model), whereas anxious rearing maintained its independent direct effect. Together the parental variables accounted for 56% of the variance in children’s fear beliefs change scores [F(3,26) ¼ 10.88, p < 0.001].
Discussion The present study investigated whether learning via negative information is involved in the transfer of fear and anxiety from parents to children. Parents were provided with information about an unknown animal, and instructed to describe a series of imaginary confrontations with this animal to their child. Results indicated that changes in children’s fear of the animal were a function of the type of information that was provided to the parents. Children of parents who had received negative information showed a significant increase in self-reported fear, children of parents who had been provided with positive information displayed a significant decrease in fear, whereas fear in children of parents who had been given the ambiguous information remained on average unchanged. Altogether, these findings provide support for Rachman’s (1977) idea that instructional processes play a role in the formation of childhood fears. In the ambiguous information condition, it was found that the transmission of fear was dependent on parents’ levels of trait anxiety. More precisely, high trait anxious parents told more negative narratives after they had received ambiguous information about the unknown animal, which in turn produced higher fear in their children. On the basis of this result one might conclude that fear and anxiety in the parent can be transferred to the child via the negative information pathway. However, two critical remarks are in order with regard to such an interpretation. First, although manipulation check data indicated that various types of information produced differential evaluations of the unknown animal in terms of kindness and scariness, formally we do not know whether the information also produced fear in parents, and especially in those who were high trait anxious. Second, even if we do assume that fear was transmitted from parents to their child, it remains unclear why ambiguous information has fear-enhancing properties. One possibility is that the equivocal information produces fear-related reasoning biases (Muris et al., 2009), initially in high trait anxious parents and later on in their children, which strongly guide the formation of fear and anxiety (Muris & Field, 2008). Anxious rearing was also found to have a unique impact on the development of children’s fear. Unlike parental trait anxiety, this influence was not exerted via the negative information pathway. Instead, results suggested that there was a direct link between anxious rearing and the increase in children’s fear. At least two possible explanations can be put forward for this result. The first explanation is concerned with the fact that anxious rearing and change in fear beliefs were assessed by means of questionnaires that were both completed by the children. So, it may well be the case that shared method variance accounted for the unique link between these two variables. The
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second explanation is more interesting from a theoretical pointof-view and assumes that anxious rearing acts upon children’s fear via a different learning mechanism than the verbal information pathway. Wood, McLeod, Sigman, Hwang, and Chu (2003), for example, have put forward that modeling may be important in this respect, and it may certainly be worthwhile for future studies to explore whether parents install fear in their offspring via this vicarious learning mechanism (Askew & Field, 2007). It should be acknowledged that the current study suffers from various limitations. A first shortcoming has to do with the assessment of children’s fear via self-report. Previous research in which verbal information was directly provided to children has shown effects on subjective, cognitive, physiological, and behavioral fear responses to novel stimuli (Muris & Field, submitted for publication), and so it seems important to demonstrate that verbal information transmitted via parents produces similar pervasive effects. Second, the data only indicate that such information has an immediate influence on children’s fear beliefs, and so it needs to be shown that such effects are lasting over longer time periods (Field, Lawson, & Banerjee, 2008). A third demerit has to do with the fact that this study only examined the effect of parental transmission of information when parents are instructed to do so. It remains unclear to what extent ‘‘holders’’ of negative information actually convey that information to children under naturalistic conditions, and this clearly is an important topic of future research. Fourth, while we concluded that parents’ level of trait anxiety had an impact on the transmission of fear in the ambiguous information condition, it needs to be noted that the STAI can be criticized because this scale confounds anxiety and depression. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent parental depression may have contributed to this result. A fifth shortcoming is that we mainly included mothers in our study. Given the common observation that there are clear-cut sex differences in fear and anxiety (Craske, 2003), it would certainly be interesting to explore whether mothers and fathers differ in the way they communicate information to children, and as such have differential effects on the fear levels of their offspring (Bo¨gels & Phares, 2008). A final limitation that should be mentioned pertains to the fairly low response rate of this study. That is, less than 50% of the parents and children who were invited to participate eventually did so, which of course casts doubts on the generalizability of the present findings. In spite of these shortcomings, the present investigation provides an initial test to explore the verbal information pathway under more ecologically valid conditions. That is, this study made an attempt to mimic the basic process of information transmission via parents, and its impact on the fear levels of children. Now that the first step in this direction is made, the possibilities for future research are legion. We have already mentioned the investigation of the basic mechanism through which negative information exerts its influence on parents’ and children’s fears and the differential effects of information as provided to mothers and fathers. Further, it would be interesting to explore the relevance of verbal information as a pathway of fear acquisition in clinical samples, and to study whether the information as provided by parents can be therapeutically exploited. Just like previous research (Muris & Field, submitted for publication), the current study demonstrated that positive information as transmitted via parents clearly resulted in a decrease of children’s fear. As a preventive strategy, parents could be instructed about this learning principle, and especially high anxious parents could be taught to provide their children with more positive information about ambiguous stimuli and situations, thereby protecting their offspring from developing fears.
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Appendix A
Appendix B (continued) The The The The
Cuscus Cuscus Cuscus Cuscus
purrs softly. likes to drink lemonade. has no claws and soft pads on its feet. is always good-natured.
References
Picture of the Cuscus.
Appendix B
Information that was presented to children’s parents in each of the three information conditions. Negative The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus
has long sharp teeth. eats scary insects. can jump up at your throat. stinks. is dangerous. kills other animals. makes frightening noises. likes to drink blood. has sharp claws and scratches your skin. will attack you.
Ambiguous The Cuscus has white teeth. The Cuscus eats all sorts of things. The Cuscus can jump. The Cuscus has a unique smell. The Cuscus is noticeable. The Cuscus lives like some other animals. The Cuscus makes noises. The Cuscus likes to drink all sorts of things. The Cuscus has claws and scratches trees. You never know what the Cuscus will do. Positive The Cuscus has nice tiny teeth. The Cuscus eats tasty strawberries. The Cuscus hops around. The Cuscus smells nice. You can have fun with the Cuscus. The Cuscus likes to play with other animals.
Askew, C., & Field, A. P. (2007). Vicarious learning and the development of fears during childhood. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45, 2616–2627. Baron, R. M., & Kenny, D. A. (1986). The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1173–1182. Barrett, P. M., Rapee, R. M., Dadds, M. R., & Ryan, S. M. (1996). Family enhancement of cognitive style in anxious and aggressive children. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 24, 187–203. Bo¨gels, S. M., & Brechman-Toussaint, M. L. (2006). Family issues in child anxiety: attachment, family functioning, parental rearing, and beliefs. Clinical Psychology Review, 26, 834–856. Bo¨gels, S. M., & Phares, V. (2008). Fathers’ role in the etiology, prevention and treatment of child anxiety: a review and new model. Clinical Psychology Review, 28, 539–558. Castro, J., Toro, J., Van der Ende, J., & Arrindell, W. A. (1993). Exploring the feasibility of assessing perceived parental rearing styles in Spanish children with the EMBU. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 39, 47–57. Center for Lexical Information. (1993). The celex lexical database. Nijmegen, The Netherlands: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Craske, M. G. (2003). Origins of phobias and anxiety disorders. Why more women than men? Oxford: Elsevier. Eley, T. C., & Gregory, A. M. (2004). Behavioral genetics. In T. L. Morris, & J. S. March (Eds.), Anxiety disorders in children and adolescents (pp. 71–97). New York: Guilford. Field, A. P., Argyris, N. G., & Knowles, K. A. (2001). Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf: a prospective paradigm to test Rachman’s indirect pathways in children. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39, 1259–1276. Field, A. P., Lawson, J., & Banerjee, R. (2008). The verbal threat information pathway to fear in children: the longitudinal effects of fear cognitions and the immediate effects on avoidance behavior. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 117, 214–224. Gallagher, B., & Cartwright-Hatton, S. (2009). The relationship between parental anxiety and child-related cognition: an experimental approach. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 33, 523–531. Muris, P., & Field, A. P. (2008). Distorted cognition and pathological anxiety in children and adolescents. Cognition and Emotion, 22, 395–421. Muris, P., & Field, A. P. ‘‘Beware the Jabberwock!’’ The role of negative information in the development of childhood fear, submitted for publication. Muris, P., Meesters, C., & Van Brakel, A. (2003). Assessment of anxious rearing behaviors with a modified version of the ‘‘egna minnen betra¨ffande uppfostran’’ (EMBU) questionnaire for children. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 25, 229–237. Muris, P., Merckelbach, H., Ollendick, T. H., King, N. J., & Bogie, N. (2002). Three traditional and three new childhood anxiety questionnaires: their reliability and validity in a normal adolescent sample. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40, 753–772. Muris, P., Rassin, E., Mayer, B., Smeets, G., Huijding, J., Remmerswaal, D., et al. (2009). Effects of verbal information on fear-related reasoning biases in children. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 47, 206–214. Ollendick, T. H. (1983). Reliability and validity of the revised fear survey schedule for children (FSSC-R). Behaviour Research and Therapy, 21, 685–692. Rachman, S. (1977). The conditioning theory of fear acquisition: a critical examination. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 15, 375–387. Rapee, R. M., Schniering, C. A., & Hudson, J. L. (2009). Anxiety disorders during childhood and adolescence: origins and treatment. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 5, 311–341. Sobel, M. E. (1982). Asymptomatic intervals for indirect effects in structural equations models. In S. Leinhart (Ed.), Sociological methodology 1982 (pp. 290–312). San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass. Spielberger, C. D. (1983). Manual for the state-trait anxiety inventory (STAI-form Y). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Whaley, S. E., Pinto, A., & Sigman, M. (1999). Characterizing interactions between anxious mothers and their children. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67, 826–836. Wood, J. J., McLeod, B. D., Sigman, M., Hwang, W. C., & Chu, B. C. (2003). Parenting and childhood anxiety: theory, empirical findings, and future directions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 44, 134–151.
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Shorter communication
Mom told me scary things about this animal: Parents installing fear beliefs in their children via the verbal information pathway Peter Muris*, Lisanne van Zwol, Jorg Huijding, Birgit Mayer Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 19 May 2009 Received in revised form 9 October 2009 Accepted 1 December 2009
This study investigated whether fear beliefs can be installed in children after parents had received negatively tinted information about a novel stimulus. Parents of children aged 8–13 years (N ¼ 88) were presented with negative, positive, or ambiguous information about an unknown animal and then given a number of open-ended vignettes describing confrontations with the animal with the instruction to tell their children what would happen in these situations. Results indicated that children’s fear beliefs were influenced by the information that was provided to the parent. That is, parents who had received negative information provided more threatening narratives about the animal and hence installed higher levels of fear beliefs in their children than parents who had received positive information. In the case of ambiguous information, the transmission of fear was dependent on parents’ trait anxiety levels. More precisely, high trait anxious parents told more negative stories about the unknown animal, which produced higher fear levels in children. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Fear Children Verbal information Parents
Introduction Fear, anxiety, and their disorders run in families (Rapee, Schniering, & Hudson, 2009). On the one hand, this familial aggregation can be explained in terms of heredity. For instance, in their summary of the behavior genetics literature, Eley and Gregory (2004) conclude that genetic influences account for up to 50% of the variance in childhood anxiety phenomena. On the other hand, family processes also seem to play a role in the transfer of fear and anxiety from parents to children. Bo¨gels and Brechman-Toussaint (2006) concluded that there is clear support for associations between family factors such as insecure attachment and overprotective parenting and child anxiety, but also made a more critical note that the evidence for these relationships is predominantly cross-sectional and that further research on the mechanisms mediating these relationships is certainly required. One mechanism that may be important in the transfer of fear and anxiety from parents to children is verbal information transmission. That is, children may become fearful and anxious when they hear that a stimulus or situation might be dangerous or have another negative connotation (Rachman, 1977). In the past years,
* Corresponding author. Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, Suite T13-37, Postbus 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Tel.: þ31 10 408 8706; fax: þ31 10 408 9009. E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Muris). 0005-7967/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2009.12.001
a series of experimental studies have shown that negative information enhances children’s fear reactions towards unknown stimuli (Muris & Field, submitted for publication). However, in spite of Rachman’s (1977) notion that ‘‘information-giving is an inherent part of child-rearing and is carried on by parents in an almost unceasing fashion, particularly in the child’s earliest years’’ and that ‘‘it is probable that informational and instructional processes provide the basis for most of our commonly encountered fears of everyday life’’ (p. 384), no investigation can be found that directly examined the role of verbal information as provided by parents on children’s fear and anxiety levels. A study that could nevertheless be mentioned in this respect is that by Barrett, Rapee, Dadds, and Ryan (1996) who examined family influences on interpretation bias in anxious and aggressive children. The results showed that family discussions of ambiguous scenarios enhanced children’s cognitive bias, with anxious youths specifically displaying an increase in avoidant responses. Although these findings indicated that an interpretation bias in children can be passed on from parents to their children, it remains unclear what mechanism was responsible for the transfer of this anxiety-related cognitive distortion. One possibility is that the interpretation bias was installed by parents who due to their own anxiety frequently provided negative information about the ambiguous situations to their children. The present investigation provides a direct test of the role of negative information in the transfer of fear and anxiety from parents to their children. An experiment was carried out in which
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parents were presented with a novel animal (i.e., an Australian marsupial) about which they received negative, positive, or ambiguous information. Parents were incited to pass this information on to their offspring by asking them to describe a series of imaginary confrontations with the animal. The main hypothesis of the study was that children’s fear of the animal would change as a function of the information provided to the parents. More precisely, parents in the negative information condition were hypothesized to describe the confrontations with the novel animal in a more negative way, thereby producing higher levels of fear in their children. In contrast, parents in the positive information condition were predicted to tell fairly positive stories about the animal, which in turn would result in lower fear levels in their children. No clear-cut fear-enhancing or fear-reducing effects were expected to be observed in the offspring of parents in the ambiguous information condition. Nevertheless, this condition had our special interest as it may well be the case that parents’ descriptions of the confrontations with the animals in this condition would be dependent on their own habitual anxiety levels (Gallagher & Cartwright-Hatton, 2009) or anxious rearing style (Whaley, Pinto, & Sigman, 1999). That is, high trait anxious parents and/or parents who tend to display anxious rearing behaviors may be more inclined to translate the ambiguous information in more negative stories about the novel animal and hence are more likely to install fear in their children. Method Participants Children were recruited from three primary schools in Spijkenisse, The Netherlands. Two-hundred-and-thirteen children and parents were invited to participate by sending them a letter with information about the study, along with a consent form. Ninety children and parents responded positively to this invitation, which means that the response rate was 42.3%. During the course of the study, two child/parent pairs refrained from participation. Thus, the final sample consisted of 88 children (46 boys and 42 girls) who had a mean age of 10.28 years (SD ¼ 1.07, range 8–13 years). There were 72 mothers and 16 fathers who participated in the experiment. Parents had a mean age of 40.42 years (SD ¼ 5.06, range 21–53 years). The vast majority of the children and parents (i.e., >80%) were from original Dutch descent. Other children/parents had a Surinam, Antillean, Chinese, Moroccan, Turkish, or African background. The research project was officially approved by the Ethical Committee of Psychological Research of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Material and information A detailed black-and-white drawing printed on an A4-paper was used to show children what a Cuscus looks like (Appendix A). None of the children and parents had ever heard of this Australian marsupial prior to the experiment. The information about the Cuscus that was given to the parents consisted of 10 sentences that were provided in three versions: negative, ambiguous, and positive (Appendix B). Sentences were matched for content and word frequency (Center for Lexical Information, 1993). Further, three independent raters (psychologists) and three children were asked to classify each sentence as negative, ambiguous, or positive. Percentages of correct classification were high (i.e., 90–100%; Muris et al., 2009), indicating that the information provided about the Cuscus indeed differed across the three conditions.
Child assessment The Fear Beliefs Questionnaire (FBQ; Field, Argyris, & Knowles, 2001) consisted of 10 items (e.g., ‘‘Would you find it scary to touch a Cuscus?’’), which have to be rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 ¼ No, not at all to 5 ¼ Yes, definitely. A total fear belief score is computed by summing the ratings on all items (range 10–50). Cronbach’s alphas of the FBQ in the present study were 0.81 at the pre-test and 0.93 at the post-test assessment, which is well in line with previous studies demonstrating that this scale provides a reliable index of fear beliefs (Field et al., 2001; Muris et al., 2009). Children’s general levels of fearfulness were measured with a shortened version of the Fear Survey Schedule for ChildrenRevised (FSSC-R; Ollendick, 1983). This questionnaire consists of 25 items that are scored on a three-point scale with 1 ¼ No fear, 2 ¼ Some fear, and 3 ¼ A lot of fear. A total score (Cronbach’s alpha ¼ 0.81) can be obtained by summing across all items (range 25–75). The short version of the FSSC-R correlates 0.97 with the full-length scale, which has been shown to be a reliable and valid index of childhood fear (e.g., Muris, Merckelbach, Ollendick, King, & Bogie, 2002). The anxious rearing subscale of the Modified EMBU (Egna Minnen Betraffende Uppfostran which is Swedish for ‘My memories of Upbringing’; Castro, Toro, Van der Ende, & Arrindell, 1993) for Children (EMBU-C) consists of 10 items that measure children’s perceptions of cautious, fearful, and worrisome parenting behaviors. Items such as ‘‘Your parents warn you of all possible dangers’’ have to be rated on a 4-point Likert scale with 1 ¼ No, never, 2 ¼ Yes, but seldom, 3 ¼ Yes, often, 4 ¼ Yes, most of the time. A psychometric evaluation of the EMBU-C has shown that this scale is reliable in terms of internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha ¼ 0.79; in the current study, alpha was 0.60) and test-retest stability (r ¼ 0.81), and correlates significantly with childhood anxiety symptoms (Muris, Meesters, & Van Brakel, 2003). Parent assessment Trait anxiety in the parents was measured by means of the Y2version of Spielberger’s (1983) State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). This widely employed self-report scale consists of 20 items that assess how respondents feel ‘‘generally’’. A total score (Cronbach’s alpha ¼ 0.92) can be obtained (range 20–80), with higher scores being indicative for higher levels of trait anxiety. There is clear support for the psychometric qualities of the STAI (Spielberger, 1983). Procedure The assessment consisted of two sessions which were both carried out by one and the same experimenter. The first assessment session took place in children’s classroom at school. Children began with completing the shortened FSSC-R and then were given an A4sheet with a picture of the Cuscus and asked to complete the FBQ for this animal, although they did not really know anything about its life style (i.e., pre-information FBQ). The second assessment session occurred at children’s home and took place within 2–3 weeks after the initial assessment. The home session, during which the child and only one of the parents were present, started by showing parents the picture of the Cuscus and giving them a small card with 10 sentences of information about this animal, which were dependent on the information condition (i.e., negative, positive, and ambiguous) they had been randomly assigned to. They were asked to read the sentences silently and to form themselves a picture of what the Cuscus was like. As a manipulation check,
P. Muris et al. / Behaviour Research and Therapy 48 (2010) 341–346
parents completed two items ‘‘The Cuscus is a kind animal’’ and ‘‘The Cuscus is scary’’ that had to be answered on 10-point Likert scales with 1 ¼ Not at all true and 10 ¼ Very true. In the meantime, children were asked to complete the anxious rearing subscale of the Modified EMBU-C. Following this, parents were given four brief vignettes describing a series of confrontations with the animal (i.e., ‘‘The Cuscus encounters another animal’’, ‘‘Your child asks whether he/ she can have a Cuscus for his/her birthday’’, ‘‘You have to clean the cage of a Cuscus’’, ‘‘Your child is playing in the park and then a Cuscus approaches’’) with the instruction to tell their children what would happen in these situations. They were explicitly told that they were allowed to use the information that they had been reading on the card, but also that they could add their own information based on the picture that they had formed of the animal. For each of the vignettes, parents were asked to tell their child what would happen in that situation, while children were instructed to just listen carefully so that they would learn more about the Cuscus. All the narratives that were told by the parents were taped by means of an audio recorder, and than scored by a blind rater who counted the number of words for each of the narratives and, most importantly, the number of negative statements that the parent made about the Cuscus. A second independent and blind rater did the same for the narratives of 30 randomly selected children, and in this way it was established that the inter-rater reliability for this ‘negative statements about the Cuscus’ variable was high (r ¼ 0.97). Finally, parents were asked to complete the trait anxiety version of the STAI, while children filled out the FBQ for the second time (i.e., post-information FBQ). Then, children and parents were debriefed, they were provided with some real information about the Cuscus, and children received a small present in return for their participation in the study. Results Pre-experimental comparisons Table 1 displays the general characteristics of children and parents in various verbal information groups. A series of one-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) and Chi square tests revealed no significant between-group differences, and so it can be concluded that the three randomly created groups were highly comparable in terms of demographic characteristics and other important variables such as children’s fear and parents’ trait anxiety and anxious rearing.
Table 1 General characteristics (frequencies or means with standard deviations) of children and parents in the three verbal information groups. Negative
Ambiguous
Positive
N
29
30
29
Children Sex (boys/girls) Mean age Ethnicity (Dutch/non-Dutch) Fearfulness (FSSC-R) Anxious rearing (EMBU-C)
14/15 10.31 (1.11) 20/9 38.93 (5.52) 20.31 (3.41)
16/14 10.17 (1.05) 23/7 40.63 (7.05) 20.07 (3.05)
16/13 10.28 (1.00) 23/6 38.90 (6.55) 20.59 (3.64)
Parents Sex (mothers/fathers) Mean age Ethnicity (Dutch/non-Dutch) Trait anxiety (STAI)
22/7 39.93 (6.02) 23/6 35.00 (7.48)
27/3 40.10 (5.23) 26/4 36.83 (10.56)
23/6 41.24 (3.73) 25/4 32.93 (8.89)
Note. FSSC-R ¼ Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised, STAI ¼ State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, EMBU-C ¼ Egna Minnen Betraffende Uppfostran (My Memories of Upbringing) for Children.
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Effects of information on parents’ evaluation and narratives of the animal Parents in the three verbal information groups received differential information about the Cuscus. To study the effects of this experimental manipulation, ANCOVAs (with trait anxiety as covariate) were carried out on parents’ ratings of the kindness and scariness of this animal. As shown in Table 2, parents who had received positive information clearly evaluated the Cuscus as more kind than parents who were given negative information, while parents who had been presented with ambiguous information scored in between [F(2,84) ¼ 41.09, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.49]. Further, parents who were presented with negative information rated the Cuscus as significantly more scary than the parents in the ambiguous and positive information groups [F(2,84) ¼ 32.86, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.44]. An ANCOVA performed on the total number of words in response to the four vignettes indicated that parents who had received the ambiguous information about the Cuscus told somewhat longer narratives to their children than parents had been given the positive information [F(2,84) ¼ 3.60, p < 0.05, partial h2 ¼ 0.08]. More importantly, it was found that parents in the negative information condition made clearly more negative statements about the Cuscus in their accounts to the children than parents in the ambiguous information condition, who in turn made significantly more negative remarks about this animal than the parents in the positive information condition [F(2,84) ¼ 138.53, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.77; see Table 2]. This analysis also revealed a significant main effect of the covariate trait anxiety [F(1,84) ¼ 8.89, p < 0.01, partial h2 ¼ 0.10]: higher levels of parents’ trait anxiety were associated with a higher frequency of negative statements about the Cuscus during narratives to the children. Altogether, these data demonstrate that the information given to the parents changed their evaluation of the Cuscus and instigated them to tell differentially valenced narratives to their children.
Effects on children’s fear beliefs Fig. 1 shows children’s mean fear beliefs scores in relation to the Cuscus before and after listening to the narratives told by their parents who had been provided with either negative, ambiguous, or positive information about this novel animal. A 3 (groups) 2 (sex) 2 (occasions: pre-test vs. post-test) ANCOVA, with the last factor being a repeated measure and FSSC-R general fearfulness scores as the covariate, yielded the crucial interaction effect of groups and occasions [F(2,81) ¼ 33.39, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.45].
Table 2 Mean scores (standard deviations) on the rating scales and negative statements score as derived from the narratives of the novel animal for parents in the three verbal information groups.
N Rating scales Kindness of the Cuscus Scariness of the Cuscus
Negative
Ambiguous
Positive
29
30
29
2.90 (2.82)a 6.69 (3.25)a
6.40 (2.21)b 2.80 (2.07)b
8.41 (1.84)c 1.83 (1.65)b
Narratives told to children Total number of words 465.72 (184.32)a,b 493.97 (170.81)a 384.55 (110.02)b Negative statements 21.90 (7.29)a 4.23 (5.92)b 0.45 (0.91)c about Cuscus Note. Means with different subscripts differ at p < 0.05 as determined by means of Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc tests.
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40
35
30 Negative 25
Ambiguous Positive
20
15
10 Pre-test
Post-test
Fig. 1. Graph showing children’s mean fear beliefs scores (standard errors) in relation to the Cuscus before and after listening to narratives of their parents who had been provided with either negative, ambiguous, or positive information about this novel animal.
trait anxiety/anxious rearing and the increase in children’s fear beliefs. For this purpose, Baron and Kenny’s (1986) four steps approach for testing mediation effects was utilized. Regression analyses with parental trait anxiety as the predictor variable revealed that the standardized b’s for the relations among parental trait anxiety, negative statements, and increase in children’s fear beliefs were all positive and significant (all b’s between 0.51 and 0.64, p’s < 0.01). Further, it was found that the relationship between parental trait anxiety and children’s fear beliefs (b ¼ 0.51, p < 0.01) clearly attenuated and was no longer significant when the mediator ‘negative statements’ was entered into the equation (b ¼ 0.13, p ¼ 0.48; Fig. 2-A). A Sobel (1982) test confirmed that the mediation effect of negative statements on the link between parental trait anxiety and children’s fear beliefs was indeed significant (Z ¼ 2.15, p < 0.05). The analyses with anxious rearing as the predictor yielded no evidence for the hypothesized mediation effect. More precisely, the relation between this parenting variable and the mediator of ‘negative self-statements’ was not significant (b ¼ 0.18, p ¼ 0.35) and so one of the basic conditions for mediation was not met. Nevertheless, it was found that anxious rearing had
A Further analysis indicated that the fear beliefs of children in various information groups did not differ at the beginning of the experiment [F(2,81) < 1], but were clearly diverging after children had listened to their parents’ narratives about the Cuscus [F(2,81) ¼ 44.58, p < 0.001, partial h2 ¼ 0.52]. Bonferroni-corrected between- and within-group comparisons revealed that (1) fear beliefs increased from pre- to post-test in children of parents who had received negative information and decreased in children of parents who had been provided with positive information (both p’s < 0.001), whereas those in children of parents who were exposed to ambiguous information did not change (p ¼ 1.00), and (2) at post-test, children in the negative information group displayed higher levels of fear beliefs than children in the ambiguous information group, who in turn exhibited higher fear levels than children in the positive information group (all p’s < 0.001). In other words, it can be concluded that children’s fear beliefs of a novel animal were affected by the type of information they received from their parents.
Negative statements Parent
0.64**
Trait anxiety
0.59** 0.13 (0.51**)
Parent
↑ Fear beliefs Child
R 2 = 0.47
B Negative statements Parent
0.62**
Anxious rearing
0.32*
Parent
↑ Fear beliefs Child 2
R = 0.55 Parent variables that influence the verbal information pathway To examine the relations between parent variables and the installation of fear in children via verbal information, Pearson correlations were computed between the parent variables of trait anxiety (STAI), anxious rearing (EMBU-C), negative statements (as derived from parents’ narratives about the Cuscus), and the increase in fear beliefs (i.e., FBQ post-test minus FBQ pre-test) for children in the ambiguous information condition.1 The results demonstrated that there were positive and significant correlations between trait anxiety, anxious rearing, and negative statements on the one hand, and the increase of children’s fear beliefs, on the other hand (r’s being 0.51, 0.43, and 0.68, respectively, all p’s < 0.05). Regression analysis was used to examine whether negative statements acted as a mediator in the relation between parental
1 In the negative and positive information conditions, such an analysis was not viable because the verbal information provided in these conditions fully overruled the influence of the parental variables.
C Negative statements Parent
0.64**
Trait anxiety
0.58** 0.07 (0.43**)
Parent
↑ Fear beliefs Child
R 2 = 0.56 Anxious rearing
0.31* (0.33*)
Parent
Fig. 2. Schematic overview of the results as obtained with regression analyses predicting the increase in fear beliefs of children for whom parents had received ambiguous information about the novel animal. Model A: Parental trait anxiety as predictor. Model B: Anxious rearing as predictor. Model C: Both parental trait anxiety and anxious rearing as predictors. Standardized b’s are reported for each of the paths. To display effects of mediation, pre-mediator standardized b’s are shown in parentheses. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.
P. Muris et al. / Behaviour Research and Therapy 48 (2010) 341–346
a significant direct effect on the increase in children’s fear beliefs (b ¼ 0.32, p < 0.01; Fig. 2-B). A joint regression analysis in which trait anxiety and anxious rearing were simultaneously entered as predictors revealed that both parental factors made unique and significant contributions to children’s fear beliefs. As shown in Fig. 2-C, the influence of trait anxiety on the increase in children’s fear beliefs was fully mediated by the negative statements variable (which was entered subsequently in the regression model), whereas anxious rearing maintained its independent direct effect. Together the parental variables accounted for 56% of the variance in children’s fear beliefs change scores [F(3,26) ¼ 10.88, p < 0.001].
Discussion The present study investigated whether learning via negative information is involved in the transfer of fear and anxiety from parents to children. Parents were provided with information about an unknown animal, and instructed to describe a series of imaginary confrontations with this animal to their child. Results indicated that changes in children’s fear of the animal were a function of the type of information that was provided to the parents. Children of parents who had received negative information showed a significant increase in self-reported fear, children of parents who had been provided with positive information displayed a significant decrease in fear, whereas fear in children of parents who had been given the ambiguous information remained on average unchanged. Altogether, these findings provide support for Rachman’s (1977) idea that instructional processes play a role in the formation of childhood fears. In the ambiguous information condition, it was found that the transmission of fear was dependent on parents’ levels of trait anxiety. More precisely, high trait anxious parents told more negative narratives after they had received ambiguous information about the unknown animal, which in turn produced higher fear in their children. On the basis of this result one might conclude that fear and anxiety in the parent can be transferred to the child via the negative information pathway. However, two critical remarks are in order with regard to such an interpretation. First, although manipulation check data indicated that various types of information produced differential evaluations of the unknown animal in terms of kindness and scariness, formally we do not know whether the information also produced fear in parents, and especially in those who were high trait anxious. Second, even if we do assume that fear was transmitted from parents to their child, it remains unclear why ambiguous information has fear-enhancing properties. One possibility is that the equivocal information produces fear-related reasoning biases (Muris et al., 2009), initially in high trait anxious parents and later on in their children, which strongly guide the formation of fear and anxiety (Muris & Field, 2008). Anxious rearing was also found to have a unique impact on the development of children’s fear. Unlike parental trait anxiety, this influence was not exerted via the negative information pathway. Instead, results suggested that there was a direct link between anxious rearing and the increase in children’s fear. At least two possible explanations can be put forward for this result. The first explanation is concerned with the fact that anxious rearing and change in fear beliefs were assessed by means of questionnaires that were both completed by the children. So, it may well be the case that shared method variance accounted for the unique link between these two variables. The
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second explanation is more interesting from a theoretical pointof-view and assumes that anxious rearing acts upon children’s fear via a different learning mechanism than the verbal information pathway. Wood, McLeod, Sigman, Hwang, and Chu (2003), for example, have put forward that modeling may be important in this respect, and it may certainly be worthwhile for future studies to explore whether parents install fear in their offspring via this vicarious learning mechanism (Askew & Field, 2007). It should be acknowledged that the current study suffers from various limitations. A first shortcoming has to do with the assessment of children’s fear via self-report. Previous research in which verbal information was directly provided to children has shown effects on subjective, cognitive, physiological, and behavioral fear responses to novel stimuli (Muris & Field, submitted for publication), and so it seems important to demonstrate that verbal information transmitted via parents produces similar pervasive effects. Second, the data only indicate that such information has an immediate influence on children’s fear beliefs, and so it needs to be shown that such effects are lasting over longer time periods (Field, Lawson, & Banerjee, 2008). A third demerit has to do with the fact that this study only examined the effect of parental transmission of information when parents are instructed to do so. It remains unclear to what extent ‘‘holders’’ of negative information actually convey that information to children under naturalistic conditions, and this clearly is an important topic of future research. Fourth, while we concluded that parents’ level of trait anxiety had an impact on the transmission of fear in the ambiguous information condition, it needs to be noted that the STAI can be criticized because this scale confounds anxiety and depression. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent parental depression may have contributed to this result. A fifth shortcoming is that we mainly included mothers in our study. Given the common observation that there are clear-cut sex differences in fear and anxiety (Craske, 2003), it would certainly be interesting to explore whether mothers and fathers differ in the way they communicate information to children, and as such have differential effects on the fear levels of their offspring (Bo¨gels & Phares, 2008). A final limitation that should be mentioned pertains to the fairly low response rate of this study. That is, less than 50% of the parents and children who were invited to participate eventually did so, which of course casts doubts on the generalizability of the present findings. In spite of these shortcomings, the present investigation provides an initial test to explore the verbal information pathway under more ecologically valid conditions. That is, this study made an attempt to mimic the basic process of information transmission via parents, and its impact on the fear levels of children. Now that the first step in this direction is made, the possibilities for future research are legion. We have already mentioned the investigation of the basic mechanism through which negative information exerts its influence on parents’ and children’s fears and the differential effects of information as provided to mothers and fathers. Further, it would be interesting to explore the relevance of verbal information as a pathway of fear acquisition in clinical samples, and to study whether the information as provided by parents can be therapeutically exploited. Just like previous research (Muris & Field, submitted for publication), the current study demonstrated that positive information as transmitted via parents clearly resulted in a decrease of children’s fear. As a preventive strategy, parents could be instructed about this learning principle, and especially high anxious parents could be taught to provide their children with more positive information about ambiguous stimuli and situations, thereby protecting their offspring from developing fears.
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Appendix A
Appendix B (continued) The The The The
Cuscus Cuscus Cuscus Cuscus
purrs softly. likes to drink lemonade. has no claws and soft pads on its feet. is always good-natured.
References
Picture of the Cuscus.
Appendix B
Information that was presented to children’s parents in each of the three information conditions. Negative The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus The Cuscus
has long sharp teeth. eats scary insects. can jump up at your throat. stinks. is dangerous. kills other animals. makes frightening noises. likes to drink blood. has sharp claws and scratches your skin. will attack you.
Ambiguous The Cuscus has white teeth. The Cuscus eats all sorts of things. The Cuscus can jump. The Cuscus has a unique smell. The Cuscus is noticeable. The Cuscus lives like some other animals. The Cuscus makes noises. The Cuscus likes to drink all sorts of things. The Cuscus has claws and scratches trees. You never know what the Cuscus will do. Positive The Cuscus has nice tiny teeth. The Cuscus eats tasty strawberries. The Cuscus hops around. The Cuscus smells nice. You can have fun with the Cuscus. The Cuscus likes to play with other animals.
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