Threat perception predicts cognitive behavioral therapy outcomes in anxious children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: Anxiety disorders of childhood are prevalent, debilitating conditions that do not always respond to existing treatments. Attentional biases towards threatening stimuli have been reported in anxious children and hypothesized to interfere with treatment response. Therefore, we examined such biases in children with anxiety disorders in relation to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) outcomes. Method: Thirty-eight children diagnosed with anxiety disorders in a specialized clinic (21 girls and 17 boys; age = 10.50 ± 1.11 years) and 36 unaffected community controls (19 girls and 17 boys; age = 10.20 ± 1.07 years) participated. Participants completed standardized questionnaire measures of anxiety and a probe position task (PPT) with facial cues. This task often reveals a response slowing effect related to threatening faces in vulnerable individuals. Children with anxiety disorders repeated these measures after completing CBT. Results: Groups did not differ in performance on the PPT, but angry/calm incongruent difference scores were significantly associated with self-reports of social anxiety and state anxiety. When controlling for pre-CBT anxiety levels, incongruent difference scores involving angry faces predicted post-CBT anxiety disorders index scores on the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children. PPT scores did not change significantly with CBT. Conclusions: Attentional bias towards threat on the PPT task may predict response to CBT and appears linked to social anxiety. Interventions to ameliorate this bias merit further study, as they might improve treatment outcomes for anxious, especially socially anxious, children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".