Interpretation biases in childhood spider fear: Content-specificity, priming, and avoidance

Background and objectives: The relation between fear and interpretation bias has been widely studied in children. However, much less is known about its content-specificity and how interpretation biases predict variance in avoidance. The current study examined different interpretation bias tasks, the role of priming and the ability of the interpretation bias tasks to predict spider fear-related avoidance behaviour.

Methods: 169 children with varying levels of spider fear performed a behavioural avoidance task, two versions of the Ambiguous Scenarios Task (AST; with and without priming), and a size and distance estimation task.

Results: Both versions of the AST and the size-estimation were significantly related to self-reported spider fear and avoidance. These relations were content-specific: children with higher levels of spider fear had a more negative interpretation bias related to spider-related materials than to other materials, and a more negative bias than children with lower levels of spider fear. Furthermore, self-reported spider fear, the AST with priming, and the size-estimation predicted unique variance in avoidance behaviour.

Limitations: Children varied in their level of spider fear, but clinical diagnoses of spider phobia were not assessed. The participants of this study were not randomly selected, they were children of parents with panic disorder or social anxiety disorder or no anxiety disorder and could therefore partly be seen as children at risk.

Conclusions: The results support cognitive models of childhood anxiety and indicate that both controlled and automatic processes play an important role in fear-related behaviour.