Assessing cognitions in anxious children.
No true child anxiety cognition tool existed in 1988, and later work shows the gap lingers unless you pick vetted ASD measures or new tech-based interviews.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Francis (1988) looked at every paper that tried to measure anxious thoughts in clinic-referred children. The review found no tool built for that job. Most tests came from work on shy or test-anxious kids, not day-to-day clinical anxiety.
The paper ends with a clear call: build new tools that fit real anxious children.
What they found
No validated cognitive anxiety measure existed for clinic children in 1988. Clinicians had to borrow adult or school-based tools and hope they worked.
How this fits with other research
Lecavalier et al. (2014) and Kaiser et al. (2022) show the gap is still wide for youth with autism. Only four anxiety scales are trial-ready for ASD, and most self-reports were checked only in bright, verbal kids.
Seers et al. (2021) offers a fix: a child-friendly computer interview that lets 5- to 8-year-old autistic kids talk about their own worry. It is the first practical answer to the 1988 plea.
Carr et al. (1985) foreshadowed the problem. Their own data on agoraphobic adults showed weak test-retest stability and low agreement across cognitive tools, hinting that the child field would hit the same wall.
Why it matters
If you assess anxious kids today, do not trust a borrowed scale without checks. Use the four ASD-approved tools listed by Lecavalier et al. (2014) or try the computer interview from Seers et al. (2021) for young or minimally verbal clients. Always run your own reliability probes before making big decisions.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This article describes the assessment of cognitions in anxious children. As empirical investigations of childhood anxiety are few, the role of cognitions has received little attention. As such, a brief, general overview of the principles and procedures of cognitive assessment is provided. This is followed by a review of the available studies of cognitive assessment in anxious children. Because no clinic-referred populations of anxious children have been studied, this review focuses on the assessment of cognitions in socially withdrawn, fearful children and test-anxious children. Finally, two areas for future research are highlighted: psychometric investigation of cognitive assessment techniques and cognitive assessment of clinic-referred, anxiety-disordered children.
Behavior modification, 1988 · doi:10.1177/01454455880122006