Information Processing Biases and Anxiety: A Developmental Perspective

With contributions from a global team of experts this book provides a comprehensive overview of information processing biases in children and adolescents.

• The first book to provide readers with an understanding of anxiety and the role of information processing biases more broadly in the context of developmental psychopathology
• Demonstrates how researchers have explored diverse aspects of information processing in anxious children and adolescents
• Draws on the microparadigms used in the study of development and psychopathology to consider issues related to heritability, temperament, learning and parenting
• Considers preventative methods and treatment protocols

Anxiety is an emotion that appears early in childhood and follows a typical developmental course. This book provides a comprehensive overview of relevant theory and research related  to the origins of information processing biases and its contribution to clinical levels of anxiety in children and adolescents.

Focusing on theoretical and research issues, the book highlights how different researchers have explored diverse aspects of information processing, such as selective attention, inhibition and interpretation, in anxious children and adolescents. It further investigates the origin and treatment of information processing biases in child anxiety within the broader context of developmental psychopathology.

Information Processing Biases and Anxiety: A Developmental Perspective is a unique and up-to-date summary of the development of information processing biases and anxiety in childhood and adolescence, and of the preventive methods and treatment protocols.

Julie A. Hadwin is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Southampton. She has used cognitive models to study emotional disorders in childhood and has written several seminal papers to understand attention to threat in childhood anxiety. Her publications include Teaching Children with Autism to Mind-Read (with Patricia Howlin and Simon Baron-Cohen, Wiley, 1999).

Andy Field is Reader in Experimental Psychopathology at the University of Sussex. He has published over 50 research papers, mostly on child anxiety and human conditioning, and has written/edited 10 books including the award-winning textbook Discovering Statistics using SPSS (3^rd Edition, 2009). He has received teaching awards from the University of Sussex and the British Psychological Society.