The Role of Vicarious Learning in Preventing and Treating Children's Fears

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Anxiety is the most common of all childhood psychological disorders. It frequently hinders children's social and academic functioning and can therefore lead to problems in later life. Children can learn to become frightened of certain objects if they witness someone else acting frightened of them. This process is called "vicarious learning". To develop the most effective prevention and treatment programmes for fears acquired in this way it is necessary to understand when and how vicarious learning occurs by investigating the mechanism underpinning it. This is the first aim of the research programme.As with other anxiety disorders, clinical fears and phobias are associated with specific patterns of responses toward the feared object, including: avoiding it, saying negative things about it, and increased heart rate. Researchers have found that vicarious learning can cause changes in the first two types of response, but to better understand phobias it's important to show changes in heart rate too. Researchers have also shown that anxiety is typically maintained by biased ways of looking and thinking; in particular, anxious individuals tend to notice and pay more attention to their feared object (attentional bias). However, although it is thought likely that these biases begin in childhood, it is not yet known how or why they develop. Hence, we still know relatively little about this very important component of anxiety, therefore limiting our ability to prevent anxiety from developing in children. One probable scenario is that these biases begin following learning experiences with the feared object. The second aim of the research is therefore to see whether vicarious learning can affect heart rate responses to an object and how much attention is paid to it.A third aim is to evaluate ways of preventing and treating the negative outcomes of vicarious learning. Recent studies show that anxiety is reduced when people are trained to divert their attention away from the object of their fear (attentional training). We will examine whether vicariously learnt fear responses towards animals can be reversed using this type of training. Finally, we will investigate whether vicarious learning can also be used to protect against acquiring fears and eliminate existing fears. This work is of interest to psychologists, parents and teachers. It will offer guidance on how to minimise the risk of transmitting fears to children and suggest ways to intervene quickly when it is recognised that a child may have been involved in a fear-related vicarious learning event. Finally, the research also has wider implications for how animals and other stimuli are presented to children (e.g. on television, in films, or in books).