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Abstract
There is a high aggregation of anxiety in families. The aim of the current study was to investigate the role of negative automatic thoughts in the transmission of anxiety from mothers to their offspring. Participants were one-hundred-twenty-eight children and adolescents recruited from several Romanian schools and their mothers. We tested a mediation model, in which negative automatic thoughts significantly mediated the relationship between mother's and child's social anxiety symptoms. Our findings show that negative automatic thoughts can be an important mechanism that could explain the tendency of anxiety disorders to run in families. Finally, the clinical implications of such findings in the current treatments of children' and adolescents' anxiety disorders are discussed.
Keywords
social anxiety; automatic thoughts; familial transmission; child anxiety
Introduction
Anxiety disorders are the most prevalent mental health issues in children (Polanczyk, Salum, Sugaya, Caye, & Rohde, 2015). As they are more silent, anxious problems are often unrecognized (Lagattuta, Sayfan, & Bamford, 2012) and remain untreated, becoming chronic conditions. However, the burden associated with anxiety disorders in children and adolescents is huge, as mental health disorders along with substance use problems are the main cause of disability in youths worldwide (Erskine et al., 2015).
There is a high familial aggregation in anxiety disorders. Evidence comes from those studies where parents diagnosed with an anxious disorder also have children diagnosed with anxiety, or by other research showing that when compared to healthy children, anxious children tend to have anxious parents (Micco et al., 2009). Anxiety disorders can be transmitted across generations either homotipically (children develop similar disorders as their parents), as Rapee (1997) showed that social anxiety in mothers is associated with social anxiety in children, or heterotypically (children develop different disorders compared to their parents) (van Santvoort et al., 2015) .
There is evidence regarding the influence of mothers' anxiety disorders on offspring's symptomatology (McClure, Brennan, Hammen, & Le Brocque, 2001). The presence of anxious disorders within families came with a need to search for mechanisms that could explain their perpetuation across generations. Despite the influence of the genetic component of anxious disorders, which can explain only up to one third of the variance of anxious disorders (Gregory & Eley, 2007), there are still other environmental factors involved in the transmission...