Selective processing of negative emotional information in children and adolescents with Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

Objectives: Research investigating attentional bias for emotional information using the modified Stroop task in younger anxious populations has produced equivocal results. The present data investigated the replicability in younger participants of the prototypical adult finding of Mathews and MacLeod (1985) with patients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).

Method: A sample of 19 child and adolescent patients with GAD and 19 controls completed the modified Stroop paradigm with threat, depression-related, positive and neutral words.

Self-reported parental abuse relates to autobiographical memory style in patients with eating disorders.

Previous research has shown a relationship between levels of self-reported childhood abuse and overgeneral memory style. This relationship was further clarified in patients with an eating disorder (ED). Patients and healthy controls completed a task in which they had to generate specific autobiographical memories to emotional cue words.

Research on information-processing factors in child and adolescent psychopathology: a critical commentary.

Provides a critical commentary on the state-of-the-art of research on information-processing (I-P) factors in clinical child and adolescent psychology. The articles in this special section amply demonstrate the value of the I-P paradigm as a heuristic framework for conceptualizing and studying the role(s) of cognitive factors in the etiology and maintenance of child and adolescent psychopathology. However, the current status of such research also reflects a number of limitations that warrant consideration if the potential value of the I-P paradigm is to be fully realized.

Patterns of processing bias for emotional information across clinical disorders: a comparison of attention, memory, and prospective cognition in children and adolescents with depression, generalized anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

This study investigated theoretical claims that different emotional disorders are associated with different patterns of cognitive bias, both in terms of the cognitive processes involved and the stimulus content that is preferentially processed. These claims were tested by comparing clinically anxious (generalized anxiety disorder [GAD], posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) and clinically depressed children and adolescents on a range of cognitive tasks measuring attention, memory, and prospective cognition, with both threat-related and depressogenic stimulus materials. The results did reveal some relative specificity of processing in that the anxious participants exhibited a greater selective attentional bias for threat relative to depressogenic material with no such difference being apparent in the depressed sample.