The Koala Fear Questionnaire: a standardized self-report scale for assessing fears and fearfulness in pre-school and primary school children

The Koala Fear Questionnaire (KFQ) is a standardized self-report scale for assessing fears and fearfulness in children aged between 4 and 12 years. The current article presents six studies which examined the reliability and validity of the KFQ. Study 1 (N=108) demonstrated that the visual fear scales of Koala bears as employed in the KFQ are highly comparable to the standard 3-point scales that are used in other childhood fear measures. Study 2 (N=163) provided support for the convergent validity of the KFQ in a sample of 8- to 14-year-old children. That is, the scale correlated substantially with alternative measures of childhood fear and anxiety. Study 3 (N=189) showed that the KFQ possesses good internal consistency and test-retest stability in a group of 8- to 11-year-old children. The results of Studies 4 (N=129) and 5 (N=176) indicated that the KFQ is suitable for children aged 4 to 6 years and demonstrated that the psychometric properties of the scale in younger children are highly similar to those obtained in older children. Study 6 (N=926) showed that the factor structure of the KFQ was theoretically meaningful: although the data clearly pointed in the direction of one factor of general fearfulness, spurs of the commonly found five-factor solution of childhood fear were found in the KFQ. Altogether, the KFQ seems to be a valuable addition to the instrumentarium of clinicians and researchers who are working with fearful and anxious children.     

Correction to: A New Social Picture Task to Assess Interpretation Bias Related to Social Fears in Adolescents

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology -     

Behavioral trainings and manipulations to reduce delay discounting: A systematic review

In everyday decision-making, individuals make trade-offs between short-term and long-term benefits or costs. Depending on many factors, individuals may choose to wait for larger delayed reward, yet in other situations they may prefer the smaller, immediate reward. In addition to within-subject variation in the short-term versus long-term reward trade-off, there are also interindividual differences in delay discounting (DD), which have been shown to be quite stable. The extent to which individuals discount the value of delayed rewards turns out to be associated with important health and disorder-related outcomes: the more discounting, the more unhealthy or problematic choices. This has led to the hypothesis that DD can be conceptualized as trans-disease process. The current systematic review presents an overview of behavioral trainings and manipulations that have been developed to reduce DD in human participants aged 12 years or older. Manipulation studies mostly contain one session and measure DD directly after the manipulation. Training studies add a multiple session training component that is not per se related to DD, in between two DD task measurements. Ninety-eight studies (151 experiments) were identified that tested behavioral trainings and manipulations to decrease DD. Overall, results indicated that DD can be decreased, showing that DD is profoundly context dependent and changeable. Most promising avenues to pursue in future research seem to be acceptance-based/mindfulness-based trainings, and even more so manipulations involving a future orientation. Limitations and recommendations are discussed to identify the mechanistic processes that allow for changes in discount rate and behavior accordingly.

     

The Roles of Social Media Use and Friendship Quality in Adolescents’ Internalizing Problems and Well-being

Journal of Happiness Studies - Adolescents spend increasing amounts of time using social media, but whether social media use has a beneficial or harmful role in internalizing problems and...     

The connection between cognitive development and specific fears and worries in normal children and children with below-average intellectual abilities: a preliminary study.

The present study explored the relationship between cognitive development and anxiety phenomena in 4-12-year-old children. Fears and worries of normal children (n=176) were compared to those of children with below-average intellectual abilities (children with BAIA; n=105). We evaluated to what extent level of cognitive development as indexed by a Piagetian conservation task was associated with the presence of fears and worries. While normal children and children with BAIA did not differ with regard to the content of their fears and worries, normal children more frequently reported such anxiety phenomena during the semi-structured Anxiety Interview than did children with BAIA. Furthermore, in normal children, evidence was found to suggest that level of cognitive development contributes to the experience of fears and worries. That is, anxiety phenomena were more prevalent among those children who passed a Piagetian conservation task. However, when anxiety phenomena were assessed by means of the Koala Fear Questionnaire (KFQ), a different picture emerged. KFQ data suggested that fears were less frequent in normal children and those children with BAIA who had a higher level of cognitive functioning. Apparently, the Anxiety Interview and the KFQ tap quite different aspects of anxiety. The KFQ seems to measure primitive fears that are likely to be prevalent among children with limited cognitive capacity, whereas the Anxiety Interview assesses more sophisticated anxiety phenomena that probably depend on high levels of cognitive functioning.     

Do smokers devaluate smoking cues after go/no-go training?

Objective: Smoking is one of the leading public health problems worldwide. The inability to quit smoking may be the result of the amplified value of smoking-related cues and inhibitory control deficits. Previous research has shown that pairing substance-related cues with no-go trials in go/no-go training reduces the value of these cues, an effect known as devaluation. The current experiment investigated the devaluation effect of go/no-go training on smoking-related cues, and compared this effect between smokers and nonsmokers.

Design and Main Outcome Measures: 39 smokers and 43 nonsmokers were trained to respond immediately to neutral stimuli, but inhibit their reaction when smoking stimuli were presented. Before and after training, participants evaluated smoking and neutral stimuli, where part of these stimuli were subsequently presented in the training, and the other part was not used in training.

Results: Not responding to smoking stimuli in go/no-go training decreased subsequent evaluations of trained smoking stimuli compared to untrained smoking stimuli, thereby replicating food and alcohol studies and extending the devaluation effect to smoking-related cues. This devaluation effect was found for both smokers and non-smokers.

Conclusion: Smoking-related cues can be devaluated in smokers and non-smokers, thereby showing the potential for Go/No-Go training in smoking cessation interventions.