Parental anxiety: Cognitive-behavioural processes in the intergenerational transmission of fear to children

Participants were mothers and their children, recruited using multiple methods including via the distribution of consent forms in local primary schools, online recruitment and advertisements in community magazines and email lists. All families received £25 for participation and the child received a t-shirt.

Both mother and child were invited to attend the lab together for a study session lasting approximately 1 hour 30 minutes. The study began by providing mother and child with a brief overview of the experimental session. Mother and child were then separated into adjoining experimental cubicles. The mother completed the Spielberger State Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Behavioural Inhibition Scale with the child supervised while completing child versions of the same measures. Mother’s then continued to complete the ambiguous sentences task, exogenous cueing task and catastrophising interview procedures with these tasks administered within a fully counterbalanced order. Prior to each task, the experimenter ensured that mothers understood the instructions for each task. Concurrent with mother’s completing the bias tasks, children were shown pictures of and introduced to the Australian marsupials. They then continued to complete the FBQ. Upon completion of the bias tasks, mother’s were introduced to the marsupials and provided with a copy of the animal factsheet about one of the animals, which they were instructed to read through once at their own pace. Mother and child were then seated in the same room and the mother was asked to pass onto their child any information they could recall from the factsheet and wished to tell their child about the animal. The child was instructed to listen as carefully as possible so that they didn’t miss anything. Mother and child utterances were digitally recorded using an Olympus DS30 voice recorder with responses transcribed for subsequent coding. The recording was ceased when mother’s indicated that they could recall no further information. The child returned to their cubicle and was readministered the FBQ. During this time, mothers were left alone to repeat aloud as much information as they could recall from the animal factsheet. These responses were recorded and transcribed to provide a measure of mother’s memory for the factsheet information. Finally, children completed the behavioural avoidance test. At the end of the experiment mother and child were fully debriefed and were informed that there were not real animals in the touch-boxes and were given factual information about each animal.

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