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Parental and Child Influences on the Transmission and Development of Anxiety

Fri, April 9, 1:10 to 2:40pm EDT (1:10 to 2:40pm EDT), Virtual

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

This symposium will present four studies that examine the social and developmental processes that play a role in the transmission of fear and anxiety from parents to children and/or from children to their parents. The first paper reports results from a 12-year-long study examining the specific pathways from exposure to maternal shyness in early childhood to multi-method assessments of social anxiety and generalized anxiety in adolescence. It identifies a unique developmental pathway from maternal shyness to adolescent social (but not generalized) anxiety via observed childhood social wariness. The second paper examines the direct and indirect paths from toddlers’ observed fearful temperament to both mothers’ and children’s anxiety via maternal overprotection, and subsequent bidirectional effects of maternal and child anxiety across four repeated assessments in early childhood. Results suggest that maternal overprotection mediates the pathways from toddlers’ fearful temperament to both child and parent anxiety one year later. The third paper examines child-elicited maternal comforting behavior as a mechanism explaining the bidirectional associations between maternal anxiety and toddler risk for anxiety across three assessments during toddlerhood. The fourth paper uses both variable-centered and person-centered approaches in examining the concurrent and longitudinal relations between maternal anxiety and infants’ affect-based attention. It provides evidence that greater maternal anxiety relates to infants’ less engagement with faces and strengthens the relation between infant negative affect and likelihood of showing vigilant affect-based attention. Discussion will be focused on the roles of parent-to-child as well as child-to-parent effects in the transmission and development of anxiety.

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