Risk and Resilience Factors for Vicarious Fear Learning in Childhood

Anxiety is the most common childhood psychological disorder. It can impact negatively on children's social and academic functioning and lead to problems in later life. Treatment is often not sought for decades, if at all, and anxiety disorders have an enormous economic effect via absenteeism and costs to the health service. Anxiety runs in families, with children of anxious parents more likely to also have an anxiety disorder. However, the reasons for this intergenerational transmission are not clear. Recent research with twins suggests that rather than being something we inherit through our genes, anxiety is most likely passed on via non-genetic environmental factors. A form of learning called vicarious learning (learning from watching others) and parenting style appear to be especially important in this parent to child transmission. A wealth of experimental evidence looking at vicarious learning of fear of animals shows that children's cognitive fear (thinking animals are scary), behavioural fear (wanting to avoid the animals) and physiological fear (having increased heart rate) can increase if they observe a parent or stranger acting frightened of the animal. But crucially, research in this area also shows that children differ greatly in how much they learn to fear during a vicarious fear learning experience. Some children show very large increases in fear, while others have much greater resilience to vicarious fear learning.

The first main aim of the proposed research is to identify the combination of parenting style, parent temperament and child temperament factors that work together to increase or decrease children's (aged 7-10) vicarious learning of fear from a parent. We will investigate which elements of parenting style and child and parent temperament are particularly important for increasing resilience or susceptibility to fear learning within the family. The research findings are expected to increase our understanding of how fear is intergenerationally transmitted within families and identify the factors that increase children's resilience or susceptibility to fear development.

As with fear learning, large individual differences between children's responsiveness to fear reduction procedures are found in experimental research, as well as in clinical practice. Therefore, the second main research aim is to identify the parenting style, parent temperament and child temperament factors that interact to increase the success or failure of treatment. This will help us understand why some children are more receptive than others to modelling-based fear interventions in which they observe someone interacting positively with their feared animal or object. The overarching aim of the research is to create a new evidence base that will help inform the development of future fear interventions, preventions and treatments for children by improving our understanding of the main influences on fear development and treatment responsiveness.

The research will be of interest to psychologists, parents and organisations working with children. It will offer guidance on how to build resilience in young children and how families and those working with children can intervene following a negative event that might lead to harmful emotional learning. In this way it is expected to aid the development of fear prevention programmes and form the basis of a psychological toolkit or 'first-aid', suggesting ways to intervene quickly when it is recognised that a child may have been involved in a vicarious fear learning event. The findings are also expected to be of interest to those involved in developing treatments for fear and anxiety by suggesting factors that should be targeted to make treatment more successful.