Background: Social anxiety loads in families. In the present study, we focus on verbal threat and safety information from parents to their children as a potential pathway in the parent-tochild...Show moreBackground: Social anxiety loads in families. In the present study, we focus on verbal threat and safety information from parents to their children as a potential pathway in the parent-tochild transmission of anxiety. We used avoidance behavior towards strangers to measure the child's reaction to the verbal transmission of anxiety. We aimed to explore whether children with higher levels of fearful temperament show more avoidance behavior towards the strangers after receiving verbal threat information. Methods: Children between 4 and 6 years old (N= 68) participated in the study. The children were accompanied by their primary caregiver (63 mothers). The manipulation consisted of the primary caregiver priming the children with threat/safety information about the two strangers. Avoidance behavior was observed during the interaction task, which consisted of a short conversation with two strangers after manipulation. Results: The findings reveal that verbal threat information regarding strangers provided by their caregivers did not significantly increase avoidance behavior in children and there was no support for the idea that children with a more fearful temperament show more avoidance behavior towards strangers paired with threat information. Conclusion: The current study expands the current knowledge of the effect of verbal threat information from parent to child by showing that parental verbal threat or safety information did not alter their children’s avoidance of strangers. Furthermore, the current study contributes to previous research by showing that the influence of verbal information about strangers from parents to their children are not irrespective of behavioral inhibition levels.Show less
Internalising problems in adolescents with a parental chronic medical condition have been associated with many predictive factors. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of parent...Show moreInternalising problems in adolescents with a parental chronic medical condition have been associated with many predictive factors. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of parent attachment on internalising problems and specifically anxious/depressed behaviour, and to identify the potential influence of gender on this association. The data used were from a Dutch study from Sieh et al., (2012) which was conducted on 149 adolescents aged between 10 and 20 years (m = 15.1 years, 59.7% female), all with at least one parent with a chronic medical condition. Adolescent outcomes were measured using the Screening Instrument for Adolescents of Parents with Chronic Medical Condition (SIAPCMC), which was administered at two time points, a year apart. Parent attachment was measured with alienation from mother and alienation from father on the IPPA, and internalising problems were assessed with internalising problems and anxious/depressed behaviours on the Youth Self Report. A regression analysis showed alienation from the mother and alienation from the father both significantly predicted internalising problem scores, and alienation from the mother significantly predicted anxious/depressed behaviours, thus concluding quality of parent attachment significantly effects internalising problems. Girls were found to be more likely to develop internalising problems and anxious/depressed behaviours as a result of lower quality of parent attachment than the boys. The results support the suggestion of a targeted intervention to increase attachment security through increasing the perceived availability of the parent, and consequently reduce the likelihood of the development of internalising problems.Show less
Previous research showed that verbal threat information was associated with fear beliefs in children. The current study aimed to complement this research by investigating the acquisition of fear...Show morePrevious research showed that verbal threat information was associated with fear beliefs in children. The current study aimed to complement this research by investigating the acquisition of fear beliefs through the pathway of verbal parental threat information, whilst considering temperament. This multi-method experimental study investigated fear beliefs in 67 children (four to six years old) in a social learning paradigm. Children were exposed to verbal threat- or safe information from their parent about two strangers/judges. The fear beliefs were assessed for each of the strangers using an adaptation of a fear beliefs questionnaire. Additionally, Behavioral Inhibition (BI) was investigated to measure the child’s temperament. Parents reported their child’s BI in questionnaires. The findings revealed that threat information from the parents resulted in more child fear beliefs than safety information. BI did not predict variations in the effect of verbal threat information on children’s fear beliefs. The results showed that the verbal threat information pathway contributed to the acquisition of fear beliefs, but this effect was not moderated by temperament. The current study contributes to the previous literature on verbal parental information, by showing that parents’ verbal threat information contributed to the intergenerational transmission of fear beliefs.Show less
Mechanisms underlying prosocial behavior, behavior or actions carried out with the intention to benefit another individual, are unclear. Previous studies have found a positive relationship between...Show moreMechanisms underlying prosocial behavior, behavior or actions carried out with the intention to benefit another individual, are unclear. Previous studies have found a positive relationship between empathy and prosocial learning. The current study, inspired by the study of Lockwood and colleagues (2016), consists of two experiments where the link between prosocial learning, learning to obtain rewards for others, and empathy is investigated through a probabilistic learning task based on reinforcement learning principles. Participants had to choose between two different symbols and learn which of these had the highest probability of earning points in three different conditions: for themselves (selfish), for another person (other) or for no one (none). The first experiment measured the conditions with two probabilities (60/40, 70/30), whereas in the second experiment one probability was used (75/25). The aim of the current study was to replicate the findings of Lockwood and colleagues (2016) who found a positive relationship between empathy and prosocial learning with the same probabilities as our second experiment. The results from both experiments revealed no significant relationship between empathy and prosocial learning. The second experiment showed that participants learned better in the selfish condition compared to the prosocial and none condition. It can be concluded that in the current study no link was found between empathy and prosocial learning, which might be explained from the differences in research design between the study of Lockwood and colleagues (2016) and the current study. There seemed to be a self-bias in learning, i.e., people learn better for themselves than for others.Show less
