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Parental educational practices in relation to children's anxiety disorder-related behavior
Journal of Anxiety Disorders 25 (2011) 829–834
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Journal of Anxiety Disorders
Parental educational practices in relation to children’s anxiety disorder-related behavior Robert C. Mellon a,∗ , Adrianos G. Moutavelis b,1 a b
Department of Psychology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, 136 Syngrou Avenue, 17671 Athens, Greece Department of Primary Education, National and Kapodistriako University of Athens, Greece
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 27 December 2010 Received in revised form 7 April 2011 Accepted 8 April 2011 Keywords: Parenting Parental educational involvement Punishment Negative reinforcement Positive reinforcement Homework
a b s t r a c t Schoolchildren reported their parents’ use of aversive control and positive reinforcement contingencies in their educational interventions, as well as parental non-responsiveness to their requests for educational assistance. They also reported their own levels of six dimensions of anxiety disorder-related phenomena. Both parental use of aversive control and non-responsiveness were directly related to overall levels of child anxiety disorder-related behavior; these correlations were more robust than those observed in previous investigations of more diffuse dimensions of parenting style and trait anxiety. Panic disorder/agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder were the dimensions most strongly correlated with both parental aversive control and non-responsiveness, while Compulsive behavior was uniquely uncorrelated with parental non-responsiveness and uniquely correlated with parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies. Differences in the magnitudes of correlations between anxiety disorderrelated dimensions and parental educational practices are interpreted in terms of the probable differential effectiveness of their constituent behaviors in terminating parent-mediated negative reinforcers. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Several influential theorists have proposed a functional relationship between parental child-rearing practices and the generation and maintenance of the overt and covert behaviors that characterize child anxiety disorders (e.g., Chorpita & Barlow, 1998; Manassis & Bradley, 1994; Rapee, 1997, 2001; Vasey & Dadds, 2001). However, despite its intuitive appeal, at present the empirical support for a substantial role of parental behavior in the generation and maintenance of anxiety-disorder related phenomena in their children is not strong. Direct experimental analyses of this relation are only now emerging (e.g., Burstein & Ginsburg, 2010; de Wilde & Rapee, 2008); such investigations are challenged by the probable long-term nature of the determination of children’s fear, avoidance and safety-seeking behavior in parent–child interactions, as well as by the necessity of avoiding the harm that is likely to be induced in children by extensive exposure to experimental conditions that are suspected to be psychopathogenic. Moreover, five reviews of the extant observational studies of parenting and child anxiety have indicated a somewhat weak and inconsistent relation between these factors (Gerlsma, Emmelkamp, & Arrindell, 1990; Masia & Morris, 1998; McLeod, Wood, & Weisz, 2007; Rapee, 1997; Wood, McLeod, Sigman, Hwang, & Chu, 2003). Indeed, the authors of a
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +30 210 920 1723. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (R.C. Mellon). 1 Now affiliated with the Hellenic Republic Ministry of Education, Greece. 0887-6185/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2011.04.003
recent meta-analysis of the current database concluded that overall, “the connection between parenting and child anxiety was small in magnitude, with parenting statistically accounting for about 4% of the variance in child anxiety” (McLeod et al., 2007, p. 165). Among other factors that might limit the current empirical support for a systematic relation between parental behavior and child anxiety, the authors of this meta-analysis noted that most of the extant observational studies employed measures of relatively diffuse, general dimensions of “parenting style” (e.g., “controlling” vs. “autonomy supporting;” “accepting” vs. “rejecting”) rather than measures of specific parental behaviors or practices in their interactions with their children. Measures of parental acts known or suspected to generate fear, worry, avoidance and other characteristic behaviors of anxiety disorders might provide a more useful assessment of this relation (see Craske, 1999; Wood et al., 2003, for related discussions). Moreover, an instrument measuring specific parental behaviors differentially associated with levels of child anxiety could prove useful in the early identification of psychopathogenic environmental conditions, as well as providing guidance for professional interventions with parents and a means for evaluating the effectiveness of such interventions in altering potentially anxiety-inducing parental practices. McLeod et al. (2007) also noted that instead of measuring the behaviors that specifically characterize anxiety disorders, the extant studies have typically measured children’s trait anxiety, again a relatively diffuse behavioral characteristic. It would be use-
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ful to know if specific parental practices are differentially associated with levels of behaviors characterizing particular anxiety disorders. As such, the present study provides observations of specific classes of parental acts in the limited context of their involvement in their children’s education, in relation both to the children’s levels of overall anxiety disorder-related behavior and to levels of behaviors that characterize distinctive anxiety disorders. The measure of parents’ practices employed in the present study emerged from a conception of parental educational involvement that was derived from experimentally established, general principles of determination of overt and covert behavior. Mellon and Moutavelis (2009) defined parental educational involvement as the parental arrangement of contingencies of reinforcement and punishment that might normatively be expected to affect: (a) the frequency of occurrence of children’s school-related behavior; (b) the positive or negative conditional reinforcing potency of school-related stimuli and of the stimuli produced by studying; and (c) children’s tendencies to request parental intervention in their academic affairs. Based upon the relevant experimental literature, these investigators identified three classes of contingency operations that are likely to produce such effects: (a) positive reinforcement contingencies, defined as the response-contingent provision of consequences for children’s school-related behavior that are likely to function as positive reinforcers; (b) contingencies of punishment, defined as the response-contingent provision of events likely to function as negative reinforcers and the responsecontingent termination of events likely to function as positive reinforcers; and contingencies of negative reinforcement (the provision and subsequent response-contingent termination of aversive events); and (c) parental non-responsiveness to children’s requests for, or expectation of, assistance, evaluation or other forms of parental educational intervention. A children’s report instrument, the Parental Contingencies for School-related Behavior (PCSB) scale, was developed in a collaborative effort of schoolchildren, primary school teachers and behavioral psychologists for evaluating the frequency of occurrence of these three classes of parental employment of contingency operations in their educational efforts. For the evaluation of parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies, the PCSB scale includes 22 likert-scale items in which children are asked to indicate, for example, how often “My parents tell me that they will punish me if I don’t do well in school” as well as how often “My parents pressure me to do my schoolwork.” This dimension also includes items consistent with the parental intervention-based establishment of the negative reinforcing potency of stimuli associated with, or produced by, academic behavior, such as “When I study with my parents, I am afraid to make mistakes” and “After I study a subject with my parent’s help, I like that subject less.” PCSB scale items designed to indicate the parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies in their educational interventions include 21 items such as “When I study with my parents and I get a question correct, they hug me, kiss me or pat my back” or “. . .they tell me ‘Good!’ or ‘Right!”’ This dimension also includes items designed to reflect the contribution of parental interventions to the positive reinforcing potency of stimuli that accompany or are produced by the act of studying, such as “After I study a subject with my parent’s help, I like that subject more.” Normatively, children would be expected to request parental assistance for their academic efforts more often on occasions when they have difficulty understanding material or generating expected outcomes, that is, when their autonomous efforts do not produce positively reinforcing events and terminate negatively reinforcing events. Non-reinforcement is well known to elicit emotional arousal (e.g., Thompson, 1965) and this frustration would be increased when the struggling child’s efforts to evoke his or her parent’s assistance are also unreinforced. Failing to find help, if the
child is unable to resolve the academic problem, this negatively reinforcing circumstance would remain in force and might elicit even more disruptive emotional behavior and evoke undesirable forms of escape, such as giving up, defiance, complaints of illness, expressions of apprehension or inherent incapability, as well as lying, cheating and related forms of pretension of knowledge and skill. Why would parents leave their children to struggle alone in such dire straits? When parents view themselves as ill-equipped to help their children with their studies or when their previous didactic efforts have been unsuccessful, their educational interventions are known to occur less frequently (Waanders, Mendez, & Downer, 2007). Moreover, failed efforts to generate anticipated academic repertoires in one’s struggling and frustrated child are likely to elicit embarrassment, anger or alarm, such that the child’s subsequent requests for assistance can cause distress and occasion escape and avoidance in the parent. To record this form of parental behavior in instructional settings, a third dimension of the PCSB scale is composed of 16 items tapping parental non-responsiveness to their children’s educational needs in a variety of forms, including assertions of preoccupation (e.g., “My parents don’t have time to get involved with my schoolwork”) or fatigue (“My parents can’t help me because they are tired”), expressions of disinterest (“When I have a problem with my schoolwork, my parents don’t care”), forgetfulness (“My parents forget to ask me how I am doing in school”) and undifferentiated non-responsiveness (“I have to ask my parents many times before they help”). Such non-reinforcement of children’s requests for (or anticipation of) parental educational involvement would be expected to decrease their frequency of occurrence. As such, while some parents might be truly indifferent to their children’s academic struggles, it seems likely that non-involvement more often constitutes a form of parental escape and avoidance of aversive aspects of educational interactions with their children. This interpretation is consistent with an observation of a strong direct correlation (rs = .49) between the frequencies of parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies in their educational efforts and their non-responsiveness to children’s requests for assistance or evaluation (Mellon & Moutavelis, 2009). In human beings as in other species, aggressive behavior and attempts to escape (so-called “fight” and “flight” responses) are commonly observed under the same conditions (e.g., McCloskey, Berman, & Coccaro, 2005). Moreover, Mellon and Moutavelis (2009) reported inverse correlations between both the use of punishment and negative reinforcement operations and parental non-involvement with the use of positive reinforcement operations. As employment of positive reinforcement contingencies would be expected to increase children’s efforts to evoke parental educational intervention, these inverse correlations suggest that distressing, aggressive educational involvement and disappointing, passive withdrawal might both be means by which parents terminate and evade threatening or otherwise aversive educational interactions with their children. The experimental analysis of behavior literature suggests that both of these forms of parent–child interactions might increase the probability of emergence of disruptive emotional responding in children and of related escape and avoidance of stimuli produced by school-related activities, as well as an increased frequency of approach of environments and preoccupation with activities that are comfortingly devoid of academic stimuli (i.e., safety-seeking behavior; e.g., Dinsmoor, 2001). From a behavioral perspective, these are thought to be core processes in the dynamic, long-term relations between behavior and environment known as anxiety disorders. As such, levels of both parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies and of parental avoidance of educational interactions would be expected to correlate directly with levels of anxiety-disorder related child behavior.
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In the present study, Hellenic schoolchildren’s anxietydisordered behavior was measured using a Greek-language version of the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS; Spence, 1998). In addition to providing an overall anxiety assessment, this 38-item likert-type self-report instrument provides measures of clusters of overt and covert behaviors differentially associated with six childhood anxiety disorders as classified by the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Thus the SCAS affords the investigation of possible differential associations between frequencies of the three forms of parental contingency arrangement and six discriminable dimensions of anxiety disorder-related phenomena. As the scientific literature currently provides no studies in which the strength and direction of associations between any parenting variable and levels of specific dimensions of child anxiety-disordered behavior are compared, this aspect of the present study is wholly exploratory; thus no hypotheses are proffered. The employment of schoolchildren as observers of both their parents’ educational practices and their own levels of anxiety disorder-related behavior introduces a source of shared variance in these sets of observations (e.g., Campbell & Fiske, 1959). However, schoolchildren’s observations of their own anxiety responses and related acts, many of which are not publically observable, have repeatedly proved to be more valid than their parents’ (e.g., Cobham & Rapee, 1999; DiBartolo & Grills, 2006; see Niditch & Varela, 2010). Moreover, parents are likely to underreport practices that are likely to be judged by professionals as inappropriate or irresponsible, such as the use of aversive control or non-responsiveness to their children’s educational needs (e.g., Morsbach & Prinz, 2006). Thus, the children themselves were first asked to assess the frequency with which they worry, feel afraid, avoid common events, etc., and then to describe their parents’ use of contingency operations in response to their educational needs. 1. Method 1.1. Participants The paper-and-pencil scales were completed by 1520 schoolchildren (778 boys and 742 girls) in the fourth grade (9–10 years of age, N = 446), the fifth grade (10–11 years of age, N = 439), and the sixth grade (11–12 years of age, N = 585) of primary education, in 17 public schools that were located in a range of socio-economic catchment areas in urban and suburban Athens and Piraeus, Greece. By the children’s own reports, approximately 12% were born abroad, principally in neighboring Albania. For a detailed analysis of the demographic characteristics of this sample, see Mellon and Moutavelis (2007). 1.2. Instruments The children were administered the SCAS-GR, a Helleniclanguage version of the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (Spence, 1998). Mellon and Moutavelis (2007) reported a six-factor structure of responding on this instrument, in which the item content of each factor was principally or wholly composed of items intended to represent the differential diagnostic elements of one of six common child anxiety disorders. Response homogeneity scores for scales based on these six factors ranged from ˛ = .78 (Panic disorder and agoraphobia, 8 items) to .56 (Compulsive behavior, 4 items) with a median coefficient of ˛ = .71. Twenty-one-day test–retest correlations ranged from r = .79 (Physical injury fears, 7 items) to .69 (Generalized anxiety disorder, 9 items) with a median coefficient of r = .77. For the 38-item total anxiety score, the item homogeneity coefficient was ˛ = .90 and the test–retest reliability coefficient was r = .83. These reliability coefficients are similar to those reported for
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the original Australian sample (Spence, 1998) as well as to those observed in a number of other cultures (e.g., Whiteside & Brown, 2008). For a detailed description of the adaptation of the SCAS for use with Hellenic schoolchildren, and of the factor structure and other psychometric properties of responding on this instrument, see Mellon and Moutavelis (2007). The children were also administered the Parental Contingencies for School-related Behavior (PCSB) scale. Mellon and Moutavelis (2009) reported a three-factor structure of responding on this scale, in which each factor was principally or wholly composed of items intended to represent one of three theoretical dimensions of parental behavior in the context of their educational interactions with their children. Response homogeneity coefficients and twenty-one day test–retest reliability coefficients for scales based on the items of these dimensions were as follows: Use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies (22 items), ˛ = .88, rs = .87; Use of positive reinforcement contingencies (21 items), ˛ = .86, rs = .84; Non-responsiveness to requests for involvement (16 items), ˛ = .84, rs = .80. For a detailed report of the development of the PCSB and the factor structure and other psychometric properties of responding on this instrument, see Mellon and Moutavelis (2009). 1.3. Procedure In classroom groups ranging from 12 to 28 children (with a mean of 20.3 children per group), the SCAS-GR and PCSB scales were administered in fixed order, followed by an instrument for the selfreporting of demographic information. Each item of the protocol was read aloud by the administrator; the children read along and circled their answers on verbal likert scales printed in full next to each item, and the administrator waited until all the children in a given group indicated that they had answered before proceeding to the next question. The administrator was in no way associated with the schools in which the scales were administered. The children’s names did not appear on the instruments and they were assured that their answers would be treated with strict confidentiality. 2. Results As scores on the Parental non-responsiveness dimension of the PCSB scale were not normally distributed (see Mellon & Moutavelis, 2009) a non-parametric statistic was employed in the assessment of correlations between all variables. Spearman rank correlations among the measures of three forms of parental contingency arrangement and the measures of overall anxiety, as well as of six empirically derived clusters of anxiety disorder-related behaviors, appear in Table 1. The p values tabulated here are adjusted for familywise error rate using the Bonferroni correction. As reported by the children, both Parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies and Parental nonresponsiveness to their requests for (or anticipation of) parental educational interventions were directly correlated with Overall anxiety levels. The shared variances in ranks (RS2 ) were 12% and 8%, respectively. A t statistic for the significance of differences in dependent correlations from the same sample (Chen & Popovich, 2002) indicated that Overall anxiety was more systematically related to Parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement than it was to Parental non-responsiveness (t = 2.91; p < .01). No systematic relation was observed between levels of Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies and Overall anxiety. While scores from all six dimensions of child anxiety disorderrelated behaviors were directly correlated with levels of Use of punishment and negative reinforcement operations in parental educational efforts, the correlations were of higher magnitude for
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Table 1 Spearman rank correlations (rs ) among scores on the scales of parental educational practices and of behaviors characterizing six childhood anxiety disorders as well as overall anxiety disorder-related behavior.
Punishment and negative reinforcement Positive reinforcement Non-responsiveness *
Overall anxiety
Panic/ agoraphobia
Generalized anxiety
Separation anxiety
Physical injury
Social anxiety
Compulsive behavior
.35* .02 .28*
.33* .00 .32*
.34* .00 .27*
.17* .01 .15*
.21* −.07 .20*
.25* −.06 .17*
.25* .24* .07
p < .01 (Bonferroni corrected significance level).
the dimensions of Panic disorder/agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder, and of lower magnitude for the dimensions of Separation anxiety disorder and Physical injury fears; correlations with Social anxiety and Compulsive behavior occupied the middle ground. Specifically, the magnitude of rs for the relation between Parental use of punishment/negative reinforcement contingencies and children’s Panic disorder-related behavior was reliably greater than its relation with Physical injury fears (t = 4.67, p < .01) but did not differ reliably from correlations of this parental practice with Social anxiety or Compulsive behavior, whereas levels of Compulsive behavior were more systematically related with levels of parental use of these aversive control operations than were levels of behaviors characterizing Separation anxiety disorder (t = 2.17, p < .05). The scores from five of the six dimensions of anxiety disorderrelated behavior were directly correlated with levels of Parental non-responsiveness to children’s requests for parental intervention in their studies. Again, the magnitudes of these correlations differed across dimensions. As was the case for Parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement, scores for behaviors differentially associated with Panic disorder/agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder were most strongly related to Parental non-responsiveness. The difference in magnitudes between the correlations of Parental non-responsiveness with Generalized anxiety disorder and with Physical injury fears (the next strongest correlation) was reliable (t = 2.64, p < .01). Compulsive behavior was the only dimension of anxietydisordered behavior that was not reliably associated with levels of Parental non-responsiveness. Moreover, a unique, moderate, direct correlation was observed between levels of Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies and levels of Compulsive behavior. 3. Discussion 3.1. Implications and limitations of the main findings While strictly observational, present findings are consistent with a view held by several influential theorists that parental behavior plays a substantial role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorder-related behavior in children, as they indicate that empirically derived, discriminable classes of parental educational practices are differentially associated with levels of child anxiety disorder-related behaviors. Specifically, while both parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement (aversive control) contingencies in their educational interventions with their children, and parents’ generalized non-reinforcement of their children’s requests for (and anticipation of) parental assistance were both directly related with overall anxiety, the correlation was more robust in the case of aversive control. In contrast, levels of parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies in their didactic efforts were uncorrelated with overall anxiety levels. In their meta-analysis of the extant literature, McLeod et al. (2007) reported that effect sizes in studies of the relation between parenting and child anxiety tended to be greater when clinical samples and non-participant observers were employed. Despite
use of a full-range correlational design utilizing child reports, and notwithstanding the use of a less powerful, non-parametric statistic in their assessment, the correlations observed in the present study were of greater magnitude than those typically observed in investigations of the relation between more diffuse parenting styles and trait anxiety. The present limitation of the children’s observations to the relatively well-defined domain of education, a field of great import to many parents that also challenges their abilities to arrange effective environmental circumstances for their children’s development, might have increased the detectability of relations between parental practices and children’s tendencies to fear, worry about, escape and avoid threatening but ultimately beneficial activities and situations. The potential generality of the present findings is, of course, limited by their observational nature, and also by the employment of the same observers for both parent-mediated environmental circumstances and child behavior, introducing sources of shared variance in measurements beyond those inherent in the phenomena under investigation (Campbell & Fiske, 1959). However, the findings are consistent with a significant body of experimental research describing forms of temporally extended behavior–environment interactions that generate debilitating emotional arousal, escape, avoidance and safety-seeking behavior (e.g., Dinsmoor, 1998; Sidman, 2001) including some conditions recently observed to increase levels of anxiety disorder-related behavior in children (Burstein & Ginsburg, 2010; de Wilde & Rapee, 2008). These behavior–environment relations include: the provision of aversive events as a consequence of undesired behavior (punishment); the provision and response-contingent termination of aversive events as a consequence of desired behavior (negative reinforcement); and the failure to act to terminate negative reinforcers produced by the child’s unsuccessful efforts as a consequence of his or her requests for assistance (again increasing the child’s exposure to aversive events). In comparison with more general parenting styles, the selfobservation of these well-specified, well-researched classes of contingency operations might be more readily taught to parents, to whom communication of the findings that these classes of parental intervention are differentially associated both with levels of anxiety disorder-related phenomena and with academic failure in children (see Mellon & Moutavelis, 2009) might help to motivate the use of alternative, more beneficial educational practices. As such, the present conception of parental educational involvement and the instrument developed to assess the levels of its dimensions might prove to be of practical utility in the prevention and treatment of the covert and overt behaviors that characterize both childhood anxiety disorders and academic failure. The present findings are, perhaps, of particular import in light of recent increases in pressure for parents (who are generally not trained in effective educational practices) to become more actively involved in their children’s intellectual development. A widespread cultural movement for increased parental educational involvement has generally been supported by the scientific community (e.g., Hill & Taylor, 2004), but recently researchers have warned that more parental involvement is not necessarily better, calling for
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investigations of the types of parent–child educational interactions that positively and negatively affect both academic performance and emotional functioning (e.g., Pomerantz, Moorman, & Litwack, 2007). While in the present study, a form of parental educational non-involvement (Non-responsiveness) was indeed found to be correlated with the quantity of self-reported anxiety disorderrelated behaviors, occurrence of a form of parental involvement (Use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies) was also directly related with levels of child anxiety, as predicted by the basic science literature on the determinants of emotional responding, escape and safety-seeking behavior. 3.2. Relation of the present findings to studies assessing general parenting style As the present study is the first to examine the relationship between levels of parental educational use of classes of contingency operations and children’s anxiety-disordered behavior, its findings are not directly comparable with the results of previous research. However, as the present findings issue from measures that provide greater specification of both parental and child behavior than those afforded by studies of general parenting style and trait anxiety, they might help to clarify and extend this literature. Results of the present study are in general accord with McLeod et al.’s (2007) conclusion that two broad dimensions of parental behavior, termed “control” and “rejection,” are differentially associated with childhood anxiety, wherein the relation with control is the stronger of the two. The present dimensions of Parental punishment and negative reinforcement and Parental non-responsiveness, while specifically related to educational practices, bear some correspondence with control and rejection factors, respectively, the former being, as in prior studies, more systematically related with levels of anxiety-disordered behavior than is the latter. However, present findings would appear to indicate that (with the possible exception of Compulsive behavior; see below) it is not parental control per se, but aversive parental control (i.e. the use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies) that is directly correlated with anxiety disorder-related behavior, as parental control by positive reinforcement contingencies was unrelated to overall anxiety. Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies would appear to be the PCSB dimension that most closely corresponds to the parenting style factor commonly entitled “warmth.” In their meta-analysis, McLeod et al. (2007) noted that the relation between parental warmth and childhood anxiety is generally quite weak, despite the common view that this factor plays a central role in children’s emotional development (see also Wood et al., 2003). This conclusion is in accord with the aforementioned near-zero correlation between Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies and Overall anxiety observed in the present study; higher rates of aversive control, but not lower rates of use of contingent praise and other normatively pleasant events in educational interactions, predicted overall levels of fears, worries and problematic avoidance. 3.3. Interpretation of differential relations across anxiety disorder dimensions The magnitudes of correlations of classes of parental educational practices with anxiety disorder-related behavior differed across empirically derived diagnostic dimensions. We might provisionally interpret these differences in terms of plausible (albeit untested) differences in the effectiveness of the constituent behaviors of distinct anxiety disorders in terminating aversive events mediated by parents in their educational interventions. The two dimensions of anxiety disorder-related phenomena most strongly related to both Parental non-responsiveness and
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to Parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies were composed of behaviors that characterize Panic disorder/agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder. A common feature of these two dimensions, which were strongly correlated (rs = .61) in the present sample, is the unusually frequent expression of somatic complaints and related worries by the child. Several studies have indicated that parents of children who frequently complain of illness or apprehension often model and select socalled “illness” or “anxious” behavior for differential reinforcement (e.g., Burstein & Ginsburg, 2010; Ehlers, 1993; Feldner, Blumenthal, Babson, Bunaciu, & Feldner, 2008; Turkat, 1982); this practice, of course, would not be incompatible with the parental use of aversive control in, or avoidance of, educational interactions with their children. Indeed, a child’s complaint of anxiety or of symptoms of illness might provide a parent with a welcome justification for terminating a frustrating or intimidating educational interaction, while continuing to attend to the child’s needs in a domain in which the parent feels more competent. Naturally, the child’s tendencies to complain or express apprehension would be further strengthened when they thus terminate or avoid contact with aversive school-related activities and settings. When children’s school-related behavior reliably occasions either presentation of aversive events or expressions of indifference to their struggles in their parents, attention, affection and relief from responsibilities that the parents provide (even intermittently) as a consequence of such somatic complaints or expressions of worry might be especially effective in increasing their frequency of emission. In contrast, with the exception of Compulsive behavior (see below), the dimensions of anxiety-disorder behavior that were more weakly associated with Parental use of aversive control and Parental non-responsiveness to their school-aged children’s educational needs are each composed of disruptive emotional reactions to, and avoidance of, events that are more likely to occur in the parents’ absence. This is most obviously true of the Separation anxiety dimension; indeed it would not be surprising if schoolchildren tended to be less upset at the termination of parental contact when it is characterized by higher levels of aversive control. Physical injury fears and Social anxiety are also clearly related to unpleasant events that are more likely to occur outside the home environment (e.g., being bit by a dog or speaking in front of the class). Children’s expression of fears elicited by such temporally and spatially remote events would be expected to be less effective in terminating aversive parental educational interventions or expressions of indifference than would the reports of current anxiety, worries and related somatic disturbances that characterize Panic disorder, agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder; thus we might expect levels of such behaviors to be less closely related to parental use of aversive control techniques in educational contexts. As noted above, a unique and moderately strong, direct correlation was observed between Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies and Compulsive behavior; this was also the only dimension of anxiety disorder-related behavior that was unrelated to levels of Parental non-responsiveness. It would appear, then, that the educational practices of the parents of children who reported higher levels of Compulsive behavior tended to be characterized by relatively high levels of involvement that included more frequent than average use of both aversive control and positive reinforcement contingencies. This combination of contingency operations might be viewed as an operational specification of what has been termed an “intrusive” or “over-involved” parenting style (cf. de Wilde & Rapee, 2008; Rapee, 1997) in the specific domain of parent–child educational interactions. Mellon and Moutavelis (2007) reported that Compulsive behavior was the only anxiety disorder-related dimension positively correlated with a measure of children’s self-regard; thus it is possible that, in the present sam-
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ple, the repetition of adequately completed tasks and unrelenting scrutiny for errors that characterize this dimension (behaviors that are likely to function to eliminate parent-mediated threats associated with oversights in studying) tend to be positively regarded and differentially reinforced by parents with unusually high levels of educational involvement. We stress again that the current observations, which are tainted by an unknown level of extraneous shared variance in the measures employed, are strictly correlational and in themselves provide no evidence for the independent action of any variable. They are, however, consistent with a large body of well-controlled, temporally extended experimental observations that suggest that fear and avoidance of the settings and products of intellectual activity might be forestalled or undermined by the limitation of their differential association with socially mediated aversive events, reducing both disruptive emotional responding and motivation for escape via emission of acts that characterize anxiety disorders. The establishment of analogous long-term behavior–environment relations might be applicable for the prevention and treatment of anxiety disorder-related phenomena in other domains. References American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: APA. Burstein, M., & Ginsburg, G. S. (2010). The effect of parental modeling of anxious behaviors and cognitions in school-aged children: an experimental pilot study. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 48, 506–515. Campbell, D. T., & Fiske, D. W. (1959). Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait–multimethod matrix. Psychological Bulletin, 56, 81–105. Chen, P. Y., & Popovich, P. M. (2002). Correlation: parametric and nonparametric measures. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Chorpita, B. F., & Barlow, D. H. (1998). The development of anxiety: the role of control in the early environment. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 3–21. Cobham, V. E., & Rapee, R. M. (1999). Accuracy of predicting a child’s response to potential threat: a comparison of children and their mothers. Australian Journal of Psychology, 51, 25–28. Craske, M. G. (1999). Anxiety disorders: psychological approaches to theory and treatment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. DiBartolo, P. M., & Grills, A. E. (2006). Who is best at predicting children’s anxiety in response to a social evaluative task? A comparison of child, parent, and teacher reports. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 20, 630–645. de Wilde, A, & Rapee, R. M. (2008). Do controlling maternal behaviors increase state anxiety in children’s responses to social threat? A pilot study. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 39, 526–537. Dinsmoor, J. A. (1998). Punishment. In: W. T. O’Donohue (Ed.), Learning and behavior therapy (pp. 188–204). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Dinsmoor, J. A. (2001). Stimuli inevitably generated by behavior that avoids electric shock are inherently reinforcing. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 75, 311–333. Ehlers, A. (1993). Somatic symptoms and panic attacks: a retrospective study of learning experiences. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 31, 269–278.
Feldner, E. W., Blumenthal, H., Babson, K., Bunaciu, L., & Feldner, M. T. (2008). Parenting-related childhood learning history and panic vulnerability: a test using a laboratory-based biological challenge procedure. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46, 1009–1016. Gerlsma, C., Emmelkamp, P. M. G., & Arrindell, W. A. (1990). Anxiety, depression and perception of early parenting? A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 10, 251–277. Hill, N. E., & Taylor, L. C. (2004). Parental school involvement and children’s academic achievement: pragmatics and issues. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 161–164. Manassis, K., & Bradley, S. J. (1994). The development of childhood anxiety disorders: toward an integrated model. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 15, 345–366. Masia, C. L., & Morris, T. L. (1998). Parental factors associated with social anxiety: methodological limitations and suggestions for integrated behavioral research. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 5, 211–228. McCloskey, M. S., Berman, M. E., & Coccaro, E. F. (2005). Providing an escape option reduces retaliatory aggression. Aggressive Behavior, 31, 228–237. McLeod, B. D., Wood, J. J., & Weisz, J. R. (2007). Examining the association between parenting and child anxiety: a meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 27, 155–172. Mellon, R. C., & Moutavelis, A. G. (2007). Structure, developmental course, and correlates of children’s anxiety disorder-related behavior in a Hellenic community sample. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 21, 1–21. Mellon, R. C, & Moutavelis, A. G. (2009). Parental educational involvement conceived as the arrangement of contingency operations. Educational Psychology, 29, 621–643. Morsbach, S. K., & Prinz, R. J. (2006). Understanding and improving the self-reporting of parenting. Child and Family Psychology Review, 9, 1–21. Niditch, L. A., & Varela, R. E. (2010). Mother–child disagreement in reports of child anxiety: effects of child age and maternal anxiety. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 25, 450–455. Pomerantz, E. M., Moorman, E. A., & Litwack, S. D. (2007). The how, whom and why of parents’ involvement in their children’s academic lives: more is not always better. Review of Educational Research, 77, 373–410. Rapee, R. M. (1997). Potential role of childrearing practices in the development of anxiety and depression. Clinical Psychology Review, 17, 47–67. Rapee, R. M. (2001). The development of generalized anxiety. In: M. W. Vasey, & M. R. Dadds (Eds.), The developmental psychopathology of anxiety (pp. 481–503). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sidman, M. (2001). Coercion and its fallout (2nd ed.). Boston: Author’s Cooperative. Spence, S. H. (1998). A measure of anxiety symptoms among children. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36, 545–566. Thompson, D. M. (1965). Punishment by SD associated with fixed-ratio reinforcement. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 8, 189–194. Turkat, I. D. (1982). An investigation of parental modeling in the etiology of diabetic illness behavior. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 20, 547–552. Vasey, M. W., & Dadds, M. R. (2001). An introduction to the developmental psychopathology of anxiety. In: M. W. Vasey, & M. R. Dadds (Eds.), The developmental psychopathology of anxiety (pp. 3–26). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waanders, C., Mendez, J. L., & Downer, J. T. (2007). Parent characteristics, economic stress and neighborhood context as predictors of parental involvement in preschool children’s education. Journal of School Psychology, 45, 619–636. Whiteside, S. P, & Brown, A. M. (2008). Exploring the utility of the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scales parent- and child-report forms in a North American sample. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 22, 1440–1446. 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.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Anxiety Disorders
Parental educational practices in relation to children’s anxiety disorder-related behavior Robert C. Mellon a,∗ , Adrianos G. Moutavelis b,1 a b
Department of Psychology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, 136 Syngrou Avenue, 17671 Athens, Greece Department of Primary Education, National and Kapodistriako University of Athens, Greece
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 27 December 2010 Received in revised form 7 April 2011 Accepted 8 April 2011 Keywords: Parenting Parental educational involvement Punishment Negative reinforcement Positive reinforcement Homework
a b s t r a c t Schoolchildren reported their parents’ use of aversive control and positive reinforcement contingencies in their educational interventions, as well as parental non-responsiveness to their requests for educational assistance. They also reported their own levels of six dimensions of anxiety disorder-related phenomena. Both parental use of aversive control and non-responsiveness were directly related to overall levels of child anxiety disorder-related behavior; these correlations were more robust than those observed in previous investigations of more diffuse dimensions of parenting style and trait anxiety. Panic disorder/agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder were the dimensions most strongly correlated with both parental aversive control and non-responsiveness, while Compulsive behavior was uniquely uncorrelated with parental non-responsiveness and uniquely correlated with parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies. Differences in the magnitudes of correlations between anxiety disorderrelated dimensions and parental educational practices are interpreted in terms of the probable differential effectiveness of their constituent behaviors in terminating parent-mediated negative reinforcers. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Several influential theorists have proposed a functional relationship between parental child-rearing practices and the generation and maintenance of the overt and covert behaviors that characterize child anxiety disorders (e.g., Chorpita & Barlow, 1998; Manassis & Bradley, 1994; Rapee, 1997, 2001; Vasey & Dadds, 2001). However, despite its intuitive appeal, at present the empirical support for a substantial role of parental behavior in the generation and maintenance of anxiety-disorder related phenomena in their children is not strong. Direct experimental analyses of this relation are only now emerging (e.g., Burstein & Ginsburg, 2010; de Wilde & Rapee, 2008); such investigations are challenged by the probable long-term nature of the determination of children’s fear, avoidance and safety-seeking behavior in parent–child interactions, as well as by the necessity of avoiding the harm that is likely to be induced in children by extensive exposure to experimental conditions that are suspected to be psychopathogenic. Moreover, five reviews of the extant observational studies of parenting and child anxiety have indicated a somewhat weak and inconsistent relation between these factors (Gerlsma, Emmelkamp, & Arrindell, 1990; Masia & Morris, 1998; McLeod, Wood, & Weisz, 2007; Rapee, 1997; Wood, McLeod, Sigman, Hwang, & Chu, 2003). Indeed, the authors of a
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +30 210 920 1723. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (R.C. Mellon). 1 Now affiliated with the Hellenic Republic Ministry of Education, Greece. 0887-6185/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2011.04.003
recent meta-analysis of the current database concluded that overall, “the connection between parenting and child anxiety was small in magnitude, with parenting statistically accounting for about 4% of the variance in child anxiety” (McLeod et al., 2007, p. 165). Among other factors that might limit the current empirical support for a systematic relation between parental behavior and child anxiety, the authors of this meta-analysis noted that most of the extant observational studies employed measures of relatively diffuse, general dimensions of “parenting style” (e.g., “controlling” vs. “autonomy supporting;” “accepting” vs. “rejecting”) rather than measures of specific parental behaviors or practices in their interactions with their children. Measures of parental acts known or suspected to generate fear, worry, avoidance and other characteristic behaviors of anxiety disorders might provide a more useful assessment of this relation (see Craske, 1999; Wood et al., 2003, for related discussions). Moreover, an instrument measuring specific parental behaviors differentially associated with levels of child anxiety could prove useful in the early identification of psychopathogenic environmental conditions, as well as providing guidance for professional interventions with parents and a means for evaluating the effectiveness of such interventions in altering potentially anxiety-inducing parental practices. McLeod et al. (2007) also noted that instead of measuring the behaviors that specifically characterize anxiety disorders, the extant studies have typically measured children’s trait anxiety, again a relatively diffuse behavioral characteristic. It would be use-
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ful to know if specific parental practices are differentially associated with levels of behaviors characterizing particular anxiety disorders. As such, the present study provides observations of specific classes of parental acts in the limited context of their involvement in their children’s education, in relation both to the children’s levels of overall anxiety disorder-related behavior and to levels of behaviors that characterize distinctive anxiety disorders. The measure of parents’ practices employed in the present study emerged from a conception of parental educational involvement that was derived from experimentally established, general principles of determination of overt and covert behavior. Mellon and Moutavelis (2009) defined parental educational involvement as the parental arrangement of contingencies of reinforcement and punishment that might normatively be expected to affect: (a) the frequency of occurrence of children’s school-related behavior; (b) the positive or negative conditional reinforcing potency of school-related stimuli and of the stimuli produced by studying; and (c) children’s tendencies to request parental intervention in their academic affairs. Based upon the relevant experimental literature, these investigators identified three classes of contingency operations that are likely to produce such effects: (a) positive reinforcement contingencies, defined as the response-contingent provision of consequences for children’s school-related behavior that are likely to function as positive reinforcers; (b) contingencies of punishment, defined as the response-contingent provision of events likely to function as negative reinforcers and the responsecontingent termination of events likely to function as positive reinforcers; and contingencies of negative reinforcement (the provision and subsequent response-contingent termination of aversive events); and (c) parental non-responsiveness to children’s requests for, or expectation of, assistance, evaluation or other forms of parental educational intervention. A children’s report instrument, the Parental Contingencies for School-related Behavior (PCSB) scale, was developed in a collaborative effort of schoolchildren, primary school teachers and behavioral psychologists for evaluating the frequency of occurrence of these three classes of parental employment of contingency operations in their educational efforts. For the evaluation of parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies, the PCSB scale includes 22 likert-scale items in which children are asked to indicate, for example, how often “My parents tell me that they will punish me if I don’t do well in school” as well as how often “My parents pressure me to do my schoolwork.” This dimension also includes items consistent with the parental intervention-based establishment of the negative reinforcing potency of stimuli associated with, or produced by, academic behavior, such as “When I study with my parents, I am afraid to make mistakes” and “After I study a subject with my parent’s help, I like that subject less.” PCSB scale items designed to indicate the parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies in their educational interventions include 21 items such as “When I study with my parents and I get a question correct, they hug me, kiss me or pat my back” or “. . .they tell me ‘Good!’ or ‘Right!”’ This dimension also includes items designed to reflect the contribution of parental interventions to the positive reinforcing potency of stimuli that accompany or are produced by the act of studying, such as “After I study a subject with my parent’s help, I like that subject more.” Normatively, children would be expected to request parental assistance for their academic efforts more often on occasions when they have difficulty understanding material or generating expected outcomes, that is, when their autonomous efforts do not produce positively reinforcing events and terminate negatively reinforcing events. Non-reinforcement is well known to elicit emotional arousal (e.g., Thompson, 1965) and this frustration would be increased when the struggling child’s efforts to evoke his or her parent’s assistance are also unreinforced. Failing to find help, if the
child is unable to resolve the academic problem, this negatively reinforcing circumstance would remain in force and might elicit even more disruptive emotional behavior and evoke undesirable forms of escape, such as giving up, defiance, complaints of illness, expressions of apprehension or inherent incapability, as well as lying, cheating and related forms of pretension of knowledge and skill. Why would parents leave their children to struggle alone in such dire straits? When parents view themselves as ill-equipped to help their children with their studies or when their previous didactic efforts have been unsuccessful, their educational interventions are known to occur less frequently (Waanders, Mendez, & Downer, 2007). Moreover, failed efforts to generate anticipated academic repertoires in one’s struggling and frustrated child are likely to elicit embarrassment, anger or alarm, such that the child’s subsequent requests for assistance can cause distress and occasion escape and avoidance in the parent. To record this form of parental behavior in instructional settings, a third dimension of the PCSB scale is composed of 16 items tapping parental non-responsiveness to their children’s educational needs in a variety of forms, including assertions of preoccupation (e.g., “My parents don’t have time to get involved with my schoolwork”) or fatigue (“My parents can’t help me because they are tired”), expressions of disinterest (“When I have a problem with my schoolwork, my parents don’t care”), forgetfulness (“My parents forget to ask me how I am doing in school”) and undifferentiated non-responsiveness (“I have to ask my parents many times before they help”). Such non-reinforcement of children’s requests for (or anticipation of) parental educational involvement would be expected to decrease their frequency of occurrence. As such, while some parents might be truly indifferent to their children’s academic struggles, it seems likely that non-involvement more often constitutes a form of parental escape and avoidance of aversive aspects of educational interactions with their children. This interpretation is consistent with an observation of a strong direct correlation (rs = .49) between the frequencies of parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies in their educational efforts and their non-responsiveness to children’s requests for assistance or evaluation (Mellon & Moutavelis, 2009). In human beings as in other species, aggressive behavior and attempts to escape (so-called “fight” and “flight” responses) are commonly observed under the same conditions (e.g., McCloskey, Berman, & Coccaro, 2005). Moreover, Mellon and Moutavelis (2009) reported inverse correlations between both the use of punishment and negative reinforcement operations and parental non-involvement with the use of positive reinforcement operations. As employment of positive reinforcement contingencies would be expected to increase children’s efforts to evoke parental educational intervention, these inverse correlations suggest that distressing, aggressive educational involvement and disappointing, passive withdrawal might both be means by which parents terminate and evade threatening or otherwise aversive educational interactions with their children. The experimental analysis of behavior literature suggests that both of these forms of parent–child interactions might increase the probability of emergence of disruptive emotional responding in children and of related escape and avoidance of stimuli produced by school-related activities, as well as an increased frequency of approach of environments and preoccupation with activities that are comfortingly devoid of academic stimuli (i.e., safety-seeking behavior; e.g., Dinsmoor, 2001). From a behavioral perspective, these are thought to be core processes in the dynamic, long-term relations between behavior and environment known as anxiety disorders. As such, levels of both parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies and of parental avoidance of educational interactions would be expected to correlate directly with levels of anxiety-disorder related child behavior.
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In the present study, Hellenic schoolchildren’s anxietydisordered behavior was measured using a Greek-language version of the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS; Spence, 1998). In addition to providing an overall anxiety assessment, this 38-item likert-type self-report instrument provides measures of clusters of overt and covert behaviors differentially associated with six childhood anxiety disorders as classified by the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Thus the SCAS affords the investigation of possible differential associations between frequencies of the three forms of parental contingency arrangement and six discriminable dimensions of anxiety disorder-related phenomena. As the scientific literature currently provides no studies in which the strength and direction of associations between any parenting variable and levels of specific dimensions of child anxiety-disordered behavior are compared, this aspect of the present study is wholly exploratory; thus no hypotheses are proffered. The employment of schoolchildren as observers of both their parents’ educational practices and their own levels of anxiety disorder-related behavior introduces a source of shared variance in these sets of observations (e.g., Campbell & Fiske, 1959). However, schoolchildren’s observations of their own anxiety responses and related acts, many of which are not publically observable, have repeatedly proved to be more valid than their parents’ (e.g., Cobham & Rapee, 1999; DiBartolo & Grills, 2006; see Niditch & Varela, 2010). Moreover, parents are likely to underreport practices that are likely to be judged by professionals as inappropriate or irresponsible, such as the use of aversive control or non-responsiveness to their children’s educational needs (e.g., Morsbach & Prinz, 2006). Thus, the children themselves were first asked to assess the frequency with which they worry, feel afraid, avoid common events, etc., and then to describe their parents’ use of contingency operations in response to their educational needs. 1. Method 1.1. Participants The paper-and-pencil scales were completed by 1520 schoolchildren (778 boys and 742 girls) in the fourth grade (9–10 years of age, N = 446), the fifth grade (10–11 years of age, N = 439), and the sixth grade (11–12 years of age, N = 585) of primary education, in 17 public schools that were located in a range of socio-economic catchment areas in urban and suburban Athens and Piraeus, Greece. By the children’s own reports, approximately 12% were born abroad, principally in neighboring Albania. For a detailed analysis of the demographic characteristics of this sample, see Mellon and Moutavelis (2007). 1.2. Instruments The children were administered the SCAS-GR, a Helleniclanguage version of the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (Spence, 1998). Mellon and Moutavelis (2007) reported a six-factor structure of responding on this instrument, in which the item content of each factor was principally or wholly composed of items intended to represent the differential diagnostic elements of one of six common child anxiety disorders. Response homogeneity scores for scales based on these six factors ranged from ˛ = .78 (Panic disorder and agoraphobia, 8 items) to .56 (Compulsive behavior, 4 items) with a median coefficient of ˛ = .71. Twenty-one-day test–retest correlations ranged from r = .79 (Physical injury fears, 7 items) to .69 (Generalized anxiety disorder, 9 items) with a median coefficient of r = .77. For the 38-item total anxiety score, the item homogeneity coefficient was ˛ = .90 and the test–retest reliability coefficient was r = .83. These reliability coefficients are similar to those reported for
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the original Australian sample (Spence, 1998) as well as to those observed in a number of other cultures (e.g., Whiteside & Brown, 2008). For a detailed description of the adaptation of the SCAS for use with Hellenic schoolchildren, and of the factor structure and other psychometric properties of responding on this instrument, see Mellon and Moutavelis (2007). The children were also administered the Parental Contingencies for School-related Behavior (PCSB) scale. Mellon and Moutavelis (2009) reported a three-factor structure of responding on this scale, in which each factor was principally or wholly composed of items intended to represent one of three theoretical dimensions of parental behavior in the context of their educational interactions with their children. Response homogeneity coefficients and twenty-one day test–retest reliability coefficients for scales based on the items of these dimensions were as follows: Use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies (22 items), ˛ = .88, rs = .87; Use of positive reinforcement contingencies (21 items), ˛ = .86, rs = .84; Non-responsiveness to requests for involvement (16 items), ˛ = .84, rs = .80. For a detailed report of the development of the PCSB and the factor structure and other psychometric properties of responding on this instrument, see Mellon and Moutavelis (2009). 1.3. Procedure In classroom groups ranging from 12 to 28 children (with a mean of 20.3 children per group), the SCAS-GR and PCSB scales were administered in fixed order, followed by an instrument for the selfreporting of demographic information. Each item of the protocol was read aloud by the administrator; the children read along and circled their answers on verbal likert scales printed in full next to each item, and the administrator waited until all the children in a given group indicated that they had answered before proceeding to the next question. The administrator was in no way associated with the schools in which the scales were administered. The children’s names did not appear on the instruments and they were assured that their answers would be treated with strict confidentiality. 2. Results As scores on the Parental non-responsiveness dimension of the PCSB scale were not normally distributed (see Mellon & Moutavelis, 2009) a non-parametric statistic was employed in the assessment of correlations between all variables. Spearman rank correlations among the measures of three forms of parental contingency arrangement and the measures of overall anxiety, as well as of six empirically derived clusters of anxiety disorder-related behaviors, appear in Table 1. The p values tabulated here are adjusted for familywise error rate using the Bonferroni correction. As reported by the children, both Parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies and Parental nonresponsiveness to their requests for (or anticipation of) parental educational interventions were directly correlated with Overall anxiety levels. The shared variances in ranks (RS2 ) were 12% and 8%, respectively. A t statistic for the significance of differences in dependent correlations from the same sample (Chen & Popovich, 2002) indicated that Overall anxiety was more systematically related to Parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement than it was to Parental non-responsiveness (t = 2.91; p < .01). No systematic relation was observed between levels of Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies and Overall anxiety. While scores from all six dimensions of child anxiety disorderrelated behaviors were directly correlated with levels of Use of punishment and negative reinforcement operations in parental educational efforts, the correlations were of higher magnitude for
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Table 1 Spearman rank correlations (rs ) among scores on the scales of parental educational practices and of behaviors characterizing six childhood anxiety disorders as well as overall anxiety disorder-related behavior.
Punishment and negative reinforcement Positive reinforcement Non-responsiveness *
Overall anxiety
Panic/ agoraphobia
Generalized anxiety
Separation anxiety
Physical injury
Social anxiety
Compulsive behavior
.35* .02 .28*
.33* .00 .32*
.34* .00 .27*
.17* .01 .15*
.21* −.07 .20*
.25* −.06 .17*
.25* .24* .07
p < .01 (Bonferroni corrected significance level).
the dimensions of Panic disorder/agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder, and of lower magnitude for the dimensions of Separation anxiety disorder and Physical injury fears; correlations with Social anxiety and Compulsive behavior occupied the middle ground. Specifically, the magnitude of rs for the relation between Parental use of punishment/negative reinforcement contingencies and children’s Panic disorder-related behavior was reliably greater than its relation with Physical injury fears (t = 4.67, p < .01) but did not differ reliably from correlations of this parental practice with Social anxiety or Compulsive behavior, whereas levels of Compulsive behavior were more systematically related with levels of parental use of these aversive control operations than were levels of behaviors characterizing Separation anxiety disorder (t = 2.17, p < .05). The scores from five of the six dimensions of anxiety disorderrelated behavior were directly correlated with levels of Parental non-responsiveness to children’s requests for parental intervention in their studies. Again, the magnitudes of these correlations differed across dimensions. As was the case for Parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement, scores for behaviors differentially associated with Panic disorder/agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder were most strongly related to Parental non-responsiveness. The difference in magnitudes between the correlations of Parental non-responsiveness with Generalized anxiety disorder and with Physical injury fears (the next strongest correlation) was reliable (t = 2.64, p < .01). Compulsive behavior was the only dimension of anxietydisordered behavior that was not reliably associated with levels of Parental non-responsiveness. Moreover, a unique, moderate, direct correlation was observed between levels of Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies and levels of Compulsive behavior. 3. Discussion 3.1. Implications and limitations of the main findings While strictly observational, present findings are consistent with a view held by several influential theorists that parental behavior plays a substantial role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorder-related behavior in children, as they indicate that empirically derived, discriminable classes of parental educational practices are differentially associated with levels of child anxiety disorder-related behaviors. Specifically, while both parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement (aversive control) contingencies in their educational interventions with their children, and parents’ generalized non-reinforcement of their children’s requests for (and anticipation of) parental assistance were both directly related with overall anxiety, the correlation was more robust in the case of aversive control. In contrast, levels of parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies in their didactic efforts were uncorrelated with overall anxiety levels. In their meta-analysis of the extant literature, McLeod et al. (2007) reported that effect sizes in studies of the relation between parenting and child anxiety tended to be greater when clinical samples and non-participant observers were employed. Despite
use of a full-range correlational design utilizing child reports, and notwithstanding the use of a less powerful, non-parametric statistic in their assessment, the correlations observed in the present study were of greater magnitude than those typically observed in investigations of the relation between more diffuse parenting styles and trait anxiety. The present limitation of the children’s observations to the relatively well-defined domain of education, a field of great import to many parents that also challenges their abilities to arrange effective environmental circumstances for their children’s development, might have increased the detectability of relations between parental practices and children’s tendencies to fear, worry about, escape and avoid threatening but ultimately beneficial activities and situations. The potential generality of the present findings is, of course, limited by their observational nature, and also by the employment of the same observers for both parent-mediated environmental circumstances and child behavior, introducing sources of shared variance in measurements beyond those inherent in the phenomena under investigation (Campbell & Fiske, 1959). However, the findings are consistent with a significant body of experimental research describing forms of temporally extended behavior–environment interactions that generate debilitating emotional arousal, escape, avoidance and safety-seeking behavior (e.g., Dinsmoor, 1998; Sidman, 2001) including some conditions recently observed to increase levels of anxiety disorder-related behavior in children (Burstein & Ginsburg, 2010; de Wilde & Rapee, 2008). These behavior–environment relations include: the provision of aversive events as a consequence of undesired behavior (punishment); the provision and response-contingent termination of aversive events as a consequence of desired behavior (negative reinforcement); and the failure to act to terminate negative reinforcers produced by the child’s unsuccessful efforts as a consequence of his or her requests for assistance (again increasing the child’s exposure to aversive events). In comparison with more general parenting styles, the selfobservation of these well-specified, well-researched classes of contingency operations might be more readily taught to parents, to whom communication of the findings that these classes of parental intervention are differentially associated both with levels of anxiety disorder-related phenomena and with academic failure in children (see Mellon & Moutavelis, 2009) might help to motivate the use of alternative, more beneficial educational practices. As such, the present conception of parental educational involvement and the instrument developed to assess the levels of its dimensions might prove to be of practical utility in the prevention and treatment of the covert and overt behaviors that characterize both childhood anxiety disorders and academic failure. The present findings are, perhaps, of particular import in light of recent increases in pressure for parents (who are generally not trained in effective educational practices) to become more actively involved in their children’s intellectual development. A widespread cultural movement for increased parental educational involvement has generally been supported by the scientific community (e.g., Hill & Taylor, 2004), but recently researchers have warned that more parental involvement is not necessarily better, calling for
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investigations of the types of parent–child educational interactions that positively and negatively affect both academic performance and emotional functioning (e.g., Pomerantz, Moorman, & Litwack, 2007). While in the present study, a form of parental educational non-involvement (Non-responsiveness) was indeed found to be correlated with the quantity of self-reported anxiety disorderrelated behaviors, occurrence of a form of parental involvement (Use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies) was also directly related with levels of child anxiety, as predicted by the basic science literature on the determinants of emotional responding, escape and safety-seeking behavior. 3.2. Relation of the present findings to studies assessing general parenting style As the present study is the first to examine the relationship between levels of parental educational use of classes of contingency operations and children’s anxiety-disordered behavior, its findings are not directly comparable with the results of previous research. However, as the present findings issue from measures that provide greater specification of both parental and child behavior than those afforded by studies of general parenting style and trait anxiety, they might help to clarify and extend this literature. Results of the present study are in general accord with McLeod et al.’s (2007) conclusion that two broad dimensions of parental behavior, termed “control” and “rejection,” are differentially associated with childhood anxiety, wherein the relation with control is the stronger of the two. The present dimensions of Parental punishment and negative reinforcement and Parental non-responsiveness, while specifically related to educational practices, bear some correspondence with control and rejection factors, respectively, the former being, as in prior studies, more systematically related with levels of anxiety-disordered behavior than is the latter. However, present findings would appear to indicate that (with the possible exception of Compulsive behavior; see below) it is not parental control per se, but aversive parental control (i.e. the use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies) that is directly correlated with anxiety disorder-related behavior, as parental control by positive reinforcement contingencies was unrelated to overall anxiety. Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies would appear to be the PCSB dimension that most closely corresponds to the parenting style factor commonly entitled “warmth.” In their meta-analysis, McLeod et al. (2007) noted that the relation between parental warmth and childhood anxiety is generally quite weak, despite the common view that this factor plays a central role in children’s emotional development (see also Wood et al., 2003). This conclusion is in accord with the aforementioned near-zero correlation between Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies and Overall anxiety observed in the present study; higher rates of aversive control, but not lower rates of use of contingent praise and other normatively pleasant events in educational interactions, predicted overall levels of fears, worries and problematic avoidance. 3.3. Interpretation of differential relations across anxiety disorder dimensions The magnitudes of correlations of classes of parental educational practices with anxiety disorder-related behavior differed across empirically derived diagnostic dimensions. We might provisionally interpret these differences in terms of plausible (albeit untested) differences in the effectiveness of the constituent behaviors of distinct anxiety disorders in terminating aversive events mediated by parents in their educational interventions. The two dimensions of anxiety disorder-related phenomena most strongly related to both Parental non-responsiveness and
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to Parental use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies were composed of behaviors that characterize Panic disorder/agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder. A common feature of these two dimensions, which were strongly correlated (rs = .61) in the present sample, is the unusually frequent expression of somatic complaints and related worries by the child. Several studies have indicated that parents of children who frequently complain of illness or apprehension often model and select socalled “illness” or “anxious” behavior for differential reinforcement (e.g., Burstein & Ginsburg, 2010; Ehlers, 1993; Feldner, Blumenthal, Babson, Bunaciu, & Feldner, 2008; Turkat, 1982); this practice, of course, would not be incompatible with the parental use of aversive control in, or avoidance of, educational interactions with their children. Indeed, a child’s complaint of anxiety or of symptoms of illness might provide a parent with a welcome justification for terminating a frustrating or intimidating educational interaction, while continuing to attend to the child’s needs in a domain in which the parent feels more competent. Naturally, the child’s tendencies to complain or express apprehension would be further strengthened when they thus terminate or avoid contact with aversive school-related activities and settings. When children’s school-related behavior reliably occasions either presentation of aversive events or expressions of indifference to their struggles in their parents, attention, affection and relief from responsibilities that the parents provide (even intermittently) as a consequence of such somatic complaints or expressions of worry might be especially effective in increasing their frequency of emission. In contrast, with the exception of Compulsive behavior (see below), the dimensions of anxiety-disorder behavior that were more weakly associated with Parental use of aversive control and Parental non-responsiveness to their school-aged children’s educational needs are each composed of disruptive emotional reactions to, and avoidance of, events that are more likely to occur in the parents’ absence. This is most obviously true of the Separation anxiety dimension; indeed it would not be surprising if schoolchildren tended to be less upset at the termination of parental contact when it is characterized by higher levels of aversive control. Physical injury fears and Social anxiety are also clearly related to unpleasant events that are more likely to occur outside the home environment (e.g., being bit by a dog or speaking in front of the class). Children’s expression of fears elicited by such temporally and spatially remote events would be expected to be less effective in terminating aversive parental educational interventions or expressions of indifference than would the reports of current anxiety, worries and related somatic disturbances that characterize Panic disorder, agoraphobia and Generalized anxiety disorder; thus we might expect levels of such behaviors to be less closely related to parental use of aversive control techniques in educational contexts. As noted above, a unique and moderately strong, direct correlation was observed between Parental use of positive reinforcement contingencies and Compulsive behavior; this was also the only dimension of anxiety disorder-related behavior that was unrelated to levels of Parental non-responsiveness. It would appear, then, that the educational practices of the parents of children who reported higher levels of Compulsive behavior tended to be characterized by relatively high levels of involvement that included more frequent than average use of both aversive control and positive reinforcement contingencies. This combination of contingency operations might be viewed as an operational specification of what has been termed an “intrusive” or “over-involved” parenting style (cf. de Wilde & Rapee, 2008; Rapee, 1997) in the specific domain of parent–child educational interactions. Mellon and Moutavelis (2007) reported that Compulsive behavior was the only anxiety disorder-related dimension positively correlated with a measure of children’s self-regard; thus it is possible that, in the present sam-
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ple, the repetition of adequately completed tasks and unrelenting scrutiny for errors that characterize this dimension (behaviors that are likely to function to eliminate parent-mediated threats associated with oversights in studying) tend to be positively regarded and differentially reinforced by parents with unusually high levels of educational involvement. We stress again that the current observations, which are tainted by an unknown level of extraneous shared variance in the measures employed, are strictly correlational and in themselves provide no evidence for the independent action of any variable. They are, however, consistent with a large body of well-controlled, temporally extended experimental observations that suggest that fear and avoidance of the settings and products of intellectual activity might be forestalled or undermined by the limitation of their differential association with socially mediated aversive events, reducing both disruptive emotional responding and motivation for escape via emission of acts that characterize anxiety disorders. The establishment of analogous long-term behavior–environment relations might be applicable for the prevention and treatment of anxiety disorder-related phenomena in other domains. References American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: APA. Burstein, M., & Ginsburg, G. S. (2010). The effect of parental modeling of anxious behaviors and cognitions in school-aged children: an experimental pilot study. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 48, 506–515. Campbell, D. T., & Fiske, D. W. (1959). Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait–multimethod matrix. Psychological Bulletin, 56, 81–105. Chen, P. Y., & Popovich, P. M. (2002). Correlation: parametric and nonparametric measures. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Chorpita, B. F., & Barlow, D. H. (1998). The development of anxiety: the role of control in the early environment. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 3–21. Cobham, V. E., & Rapee, R. M. (1999). Accuracy of predicting a child’s response to potential threat: a comparison of children and their mothers. Australian Journal of Psychology, 51, 25–28. Craske, M. G. (1999). Anxiety disorders: psychological approaches to theory and treatment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. DiBartolo, P. M., & Grills, A. E. (2006). Who is best at predicting children’s anxiety in response to a social evaluative task? A comparison of child, parent, and teacher reports. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 20, 630–645. de Wilde, A, & Rapee, R. M. (2008). Do controlling maternal behaviors increase state anxiety in children’s responses to social threat? A pilot study. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 39, 526–537. Dinsmoor, J. A. (1998). Punishment. In: W. T. O’Donohue (Ed.), Learning and behavior therapy (pp. 188–204). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Dinsmoor, J. A. (2001). Stimuli inevitably generated by behavior that avoids electric shock are inherently reinforcing. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 75, 311–333. Ehlers, A. (1993). Somatic symptoms and panic attacks: a retrospective study of learning experiences. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 31, 269–278.
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