Children's Anxiety Regulation and Maternal Communication

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DESCRIPTION (Applicant's Abstract): Does parental communication style affect emotion regulation among children who initially demonstrate high levels of fear and anxiety? Although recent correlational research has demonstrated a linkage between parental communication behaviors, such as excessive catastrophizing, and children's manifestations of fear and anxiety, it is not clear if parental communication behaviors directly influence children's ability to regulate these emotions. Alternatively, these parental communication behaviors may be elicited by children who express fears and anxieties more frequently than non-anxious children do. Experimental research designs would offer a more definitive test of these competing explanations of the extant correlational findings. Intervention studies, in particular, can test whether experimentally manipulating current family interaction patterns affects children's ability to regulate emotion. The proposed research will provide a preliminary experimental test of the relationship between parental communication behavior and children's regulation of fear and anxiety. Some 40 clinically anxious youth, aged 7-13, will be randomly assigned to a family intervention program for childhood anxiety problems, which includes extensive parent communication training, or-a child intervention program without parent training. By comparing these two interventions we will test if it is possible to improve parental communication behaviors-such as catastrophizing-through intensive parent training, above and beyond the effects of involving children in a child intervention program. We will then test the impact of this change in parental communication behaviors on children's ability to regulate fear and anxiety. Observational measures of parental communication behavior, children's emotion regulation strategies, and children's manifestations of fear and anxiety, as well as a measure of physiological arousal, will serve as the primary outcome measures.