Your Fear is My Fear: The Relationship Between Parental and Offspring Anxieties

Metacognitive Transmission Between Parents and Children in the Context of Anxiety Disorders

One in ten children is affected by an anxiety disorder. Current state of research shows that transgenerational transmission as well as positive (POS) and negative (NEG) metacognitive beliefs are relevant in the context of anxiety disorders in youth. We investigated whether transgenerational transmission is also evident in conjunction with POS and NEG and cross-sectionally surveyed POS, NEG, anxiety symptoms and worry in 8-16-year-old children and adolescents with anxiety disorders (n = 71) and non-clinical controls (n = 40) and one of their parents. Our results revealed significant transgenerational correlations for NEG in both samples, and for POS in the non-clinical sample only. Mediation analysis showed that children's NEG did at least partly mediate the relationship between parents' NEG and children's anxiety and worry. Children's and parents' POS did not correlate in either sample with children's anxiety and worry. Further research on the transgenerational transmission of metacognition and longitudinal data is needed.

Intergenerational Transmission of Anxious Information Processing Biases: An Updated Conceptual Model

Anxiety disorders are globally one of the most prevalent and disabling forms of psychopathology in adults and children. Having a parent with an anxiety disorder multiplies the risk of anxiety disorders in the offspring, although the specific mechanisms and processes that play a role in this intergenerational transmission remain largely unknown. According to information processing theories, threat-related biases in cognitive processing are a causal mechanism in the development and maintenance of anxiety. These theories propose that individuals with anxiety are more likely to cognitively process novel stimuli in their environment as threatening. Creswell and colleagues proposed a theoretical model that highlighted the role of these cognitive biases as a mechanism in the intergenerational transmission of anxiety (Creswell et al., in Hadwin, Field (eds) Information processing biases and anxiety: a developmental perspective, Wiley, pp 279-295, 2010). This model postulated significant associations between (1) parents' and children's threat-related cognitive biases (2) parents' threat-related cognitive biases in their own and their child's environment, (3) parents' threat-related cognitive biases and parenting behaviors that convey anxiety risk to the offspring (e.g., modeling of fear, and verbal threat information transmission), and (4) parenting behaviors and child threat-related biases. This theoretical review collated the recent empirical work testing these four core hypotheses of the model. Building on the reviewed empirical work, an updated conceptual model focusing on threat-related attention and interpretation is proposed. This updated model incorporates the links between cognition and anxiety in parents and children and addresses the potential bidirectional nature of parent-child influences.

Watch and Learn: Vicarious Threat Learning across Human Development

Vicarious threat learning is an important pathway in learning about safety and danger in the environment and is therefore critical for survival. It involves learning by observing another person's (the demonstrator) fearful responses to threat and begins as early as infancy. The review discusses the literature on vicarious threat learning and infers how this learning pathway may evolve over human development. We begin by discussing the methods currently being used to study observational threat learning in the laboratory. Next, we focus on the social factors influencing vicarious threat learning; this is followed by a review of vicarious threat learning among children and adolescents. Finally, we examine the neural mechanisms underpinning vicarious threat learning across human development. To conclude, we encourage future research directions that will help elucidate how vicarious threat learning emerges and how it relates to the development of normative fear and pathological anxiety.