Watch Out, It Bites! An Examination of Threat Information Transmission from Parents to Young Children with Specific Phobias.

Specific phobias are highly prevalent and onset as young as 3 years of age. Evidence suggests children learn fear beliefs and avoidance after being provided negative/threatening information. Little is currently known, however, about the role of information transmission in clinical samples. This study explores the role of information transmission in early onset specific phobias, as proposed by Rachman (1977), by comparing a clinical group of forty-two parents of children (aged 3 to 6 years) with specific phobia and a nonclinical group including seventeen parents of age-matched children. Parents completed a diagnostic telephone interview and parent psychopathology questionnaire, followed by an in-person novel animal task to ascertain the frequency of information they attend to and putatively provide to their children under three valence conditions (positive, negative, ambiguous). Parents of children with specific phobia putatively provided significantly more negative information to their children than parents of nonclinical children, under ambiguous conditions. The amount of negative information provided within this sample was not related to parent's own anxiety. The findings of this study extend upon previous research showing that it is normative for children to acquire fears after receiving negative/threatening information, providing support for the role of negative/threatening information transmission in pathological fears, with a clinical sample at the time of onset.