INFORMATION-PROCESSING IN CLINICALLY DEPRESSED AND ANXIOUS CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

The investigation of cognitive content and processes in childhood anxi ety and depression has lagged behind similar research in the adult pop ulation. What studies do exist have largely restricted themselves to e xamining the nature of the thoughts that anxious and depressed childre n report. There is almost no research examining the ways in which anxi ous and depressed children perceive, attend to, remember, or think and make judgements about, emotional material. The present study investig ated the subjective probability judgements that anxious and depressed children make concerning future negative events. Subjects generated pr obability estimates either for themselves or for other children for a range of events on a visual analogue scale. Events were either physica lly-threat-related or socially-threat-related. The results revealed no differences of interest with respect to type of threat but interestin g differences between the groups with respect to reference. Depressed subjects estimated that events were equally likely to happen to themse lves as to other children whereas both the controls and anxious childr en estimated that negative events were more likely to happen to others than to themselves, with this effect being stronger in the anxious gr oup. These results are discussed in the context of the adult literatur e and also the limited literature on emotion-related cognitive process ing in children.