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 fut ure negative events as far more likely to occur, relative to healthy contro ls. In addition, anxious adults estimate that such events are more likely t o happen to themselves than to others. Previous research with anxious child ren and adolescents, in contrast, has revealed no increased probability est imates 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 fol lowed 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 fo r a diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Control groups comp rised a group of healthy participants, and a group of healthy participants whose parents had experienced a trauma and who met criteria for PTSD. The r esults revealed no overall differences between the clinical group and the c ontrols. However, children and adolescents with PTSD estimated ail 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 bi as for physically threatening events but not for socially threatening ones. Developmental analyses indicated that the strength of the relationship bet ween anxiety and elevated judgements about future negative events declined with age in the control participants but that there was no significant rela tionship in the groups who had been exposed to trauma. The findings are dis cussed in the context of the literature on information processing biases an d PTSD.