The relationship of child worry to cognitive biases: Threat interpretationand likelihood of event occurrence

Worry, the cognitive component of anxiety, has been related to cognitive pr ocessing biases in adults. However, the. relationship of child worry to cog nitive biases has been largely unexplored. The present study examined this relationship. Worry in a community sample of 277 5th- and 6th-grade childre n was assessed with the Penn-State Worry Questionnaire for Children (Chorpi ta, Tracey, Brown, Collica, & Barlow, 1997). The Children's Opinions of Eve ryday Life Events (COELE) was designed to measure children's threat interpr etation biases, Children's responses to worry-relevant vignettes were used to assess interpretation of ambiguous and threatening situations, degree of perceived threat, degree of situation-specific worry, and perceived likeli hood of future occurrence. Results suggested strong relationships between c hild worry and threat interpretation biases. Compared to nonworriers, worri ers interpreted both ambiguous and threatening situations as more threateni ng expressed more worry in response to the events, and judged the events to have a higher probability of happening to them in the future, Temporal sta bility was only moderate, perhaps reflecting worry and cognitive biases as more variable phenomena in a community sample. Theoretical, clinical, and r esearch implications of the findings are discussed.