Judgements about emotional events in children and adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder and controls.

Research with clinically anxious adults has revealed that they estimate future negative events as far more likely to occur, relative to healthy controls. In addition, anxious adults estimate that such events are more likely to happen to themselves than to others. Previous research with anxious children and adolescents, in contrast, has revealed no increased probability estimates for negative events, relative to controls, and the events were rated as more likely to happen to others than to the self. The present study followed up these discrepant findings by investigating probability judgements concerning future negative events generated by children and adolescents who had actually experienced an extreme negative event and who met criteria for a diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Control groups comprised a group of healthy participants, and a group of healthy participants whose parents had experienced a trauma and who met criteria for PTSD. The results revealed no overall differences between the clinical group and the controls. However, children and adolescents with PTSD estimated all negative events as significantly more likely to happen to others than to themselves, with this other-referent bias being strongest for events matched to their trauma. In contrast, the two control groups exhibited an other-referent bias for physically threatening events but not for socially threatening ones. Developmental analyses indicated that the strength of the relationship between anxiety and elevated judgements about future negative events declined with age in the control participants but that there was no significant relationship in the groups who had been exposed to trauma. The findings are discussed in the context of the literature on information processing biases and PTSD.

Memory bias for emotional information in children and adolescents with posttraumatic stress disorder: a preliminary study.

Studies with adult participants with emotional disorders have revealed an explicit memory bias in favor of recalling negative emotional information, particularly if the information is related to the participants' emotional concerns. This process was investigated in a preliminary study with children and adolescents with posttraumatic stress disorder and control participants. Participants were presented with sets of negative, neutral, and positive words and asked to recall them after a short retention interval. Posttraumatic stress disorder participants showed poorer overall memory performance compared with control participants. They also showed a bias in favor of recalling negative information, but there was no evidence of any specificity beyond this for threat-related material. Regression analyses revealed no relationship between mood, memory bias, and age. Results are discussed in terms of the adult literature and with respect to issues of the developmental continuity of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Information processing in recovered depressed children and adolescents.

Previous research into subjective probability estimates for negative events revealed that depressed children estimated events as equally likely to happen to themselves as to other children. In contrast, both controls and anxious children estimated that negative events were more likely to happen to others than to themselves. The present study followed up this finding by investigating the subjective probability judgements concerning future negative events generated by children and adolescents who have recovered from depression. Subjects generated probability estimates either for themselves or for other children for a range of negative events on a visual analogue scale. The results revealed that both recovered depressed and matched control groups estimated negative events as significantly more likely to happen to others than to themselves. It was also found that the recovered depressed subjects estimated that negative events were less likely overall, compared to the controls. These results are discussed in the context of the adult literature.

Information processing in clinically depressed and anxious children and adolescents.

The investigation of cognitive content and processes in childhood anxiety and depression has lagged behind similar research in the adult population. What studies do exist have largely restricted themselves to examining the nature of the thoughts that anxious and depressed children report. There is almost no research examining the ways in which anxious and depressed children perceive, attend to, remember, or think and make judgements about, emotional material. The present study investigated the subjective probability judgements that anxious and depressed children make concerning future negative events. Subjects generated probability estimates either for themselves or for other children for a range of events on a visual analogue scale. Events were either physically-threat-related or socially-threat-related. The results revealed no differences of interest with respect to type of threat but interesting differences between the groups with respect to reference. Depressed subjects estimated that events were equally likely to happen to themselves as to other children whereas both the controls and anxious children estimated that negative events were more likely to happen to others than to themselves, with this effect being stronger in the anxious group. These results are discussed in the context of the adult literature and also the limited literature on emotion-related cognitive processing in children.