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

焦虑是所有儿童心理障碍中最常见的。它经常阻碍儿童的社会和学习功能，因此可能在以后的生活中导致问题。如果孩子们看到其他人表现出害怕他们的行为，他们可以学会对某些物体感到害怕。这个过程被称为“替代学习”。为了为通过这种方式获得的恐惧制定最有效的预防和治疗方案，有必要通过调查替代学习的基础机制来了解替代学习何时发生以及如何发生。这是研究计划的第一个目标。与其他焦虑症一样，临床恐惧和恐惧症与对恐惧对象的特定反应模式有关，包括：回避它，说关于它的负面话，以及心率加快。研究人员发现，代替性学习会导致前两种类型的反应发生变化，但为了更好地理解恐惧症，显示心率的变化也很重要。研究人员还表明，焦虑通常是由有偏见的观看和思考方式维持的；特别是，焦虑的人往往会注意到并更多地关注他们害怕的对象(注意偏差)。然而，尽管人们认为这些偏见很可能是从童年开始的，但目前还不知道它们是如何或为什么发展起来的。因此，我们对焦虑的这一非常重要的组成部分仍然知之甚少，因此限制了我们预防儿童焦虑发展的能力。一种可能的情况是，这些偏见开始于对令人恐惧的物体的学习经历。因此，这项研究的第二个目的是了解替代学习是否会影响对对象的心率反应，以及人们对此的关注程度。第三个目标是评估预防和治疗替代学习的负面结果的方法。最近的研究表明，当人们被训练将注意力从他们恐惧的对象上转移时，焦虑会减少(注意力训练)。我们将研究是否可以通过这种训练来逆转对动物的间接恐惧反应。最后，我们将调查替代学习是否也可以用来防止获得恐惧和消除现有的恐惧。这项工作引起了心理学家、家长和老师的兴趣。它将就如何将恐惧传播给儿童的风险降至最低提供指导，并建议在认识到儿童可能参与了与恐惧有关的替代性学习事件时迅速进行干预的方法。最后，这项研究还对如何将动物和其他刺激呈现给儿童(例如，在电视、电影或书籍中)具有更广泛的影响。

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).