Marie Louise Reinholdt-Dunne

Forskningsenheden MODIG · Psychology

Impairments in executive attention control, such as the ability to inhibit processing task-irrelevant information, are believed to play a key role in the development and maintenance of social fear and anxiety. However, the underlying attentional mechanisms related to social anxiety are not well understood. The aim of the present study was to invest...

Theory and preliminary evidence suggests that parental beliefs and cognitions may be transmitted to their offspring. Transmission of maladaptive cognitions may play a role in the development of anxiety disorders in childhood. However, few studies have investigated such transmission using longitudinal designs. The objective of this study was to inve...

Background Maladaptive metacognitive beliefs are frequent during depressive states of bipolar disorder (BD). Still, it is unclear whether they persist in remitted phases and play a role in patients’ residual anxiety. The study aimed to investigate whether remitted patients with BD display maladaptive metacognitive beliefs, and whether these beliefs...

Background Research suggests that the metacognitive model is applicable to clinical child populations. However, few measures related to the model are available for younger age groups. A key concept of the model is the cognitive attentional syndrome (CAS), which encompasses the individual’s worry and rumination, maladaptive coping strategies, and me...

Previous research shows that attentional bias is associated with emotional difficulties. The aim of the present study was to investigate the engagement and disengagement components of attentional bias to emotional stimuli in anxiety and depression using the attentional assessment task. The experimental groups consisted of 54 clinical participants i...

Attentional bias to threat is believed to play a key role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. However, the underlying attentional mechanisms related to anxiety are not well understood. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of cognitive therapy on the engagement and disengagement components of attentional bi...

In the metacognitive model, attentional control and metacognitive beliefs are key transdiagnostic mechanisms contributing to psychological disorder. The aim of the current study was to investigate the relative contribution of these mechanisms to symptoms of anxiety and depression in children with anxiety disorders and in non-clinical controls. In a...

Metacognitive therapy is an effective treatment for anxiety disorders in adults. Studies have demonstrated that the underlying theoretical model is also supported in children. It has therefore been suggested that metacognitive therapy for children may be effective. Our study is an open trial of metacognitive therapy for children with generalized an...

Parental factors have been linked to childhood anxiety, hence, parental involvement in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for anxious children has been examined. However, findings do not consistently show added effects of parent-enhanced CBT, longitudinal investigations are scarce and long-term effects unclear. In the present study, 40 out of 54 fa...

We aimed to bring a developmental perspective to metacognitive theory. The metacognitive model (MCM) was originally developed for adults. However, an increasing number of studies demonstrate the MCM is relevant to child anxiety. Therefore, it is important to understand the origins of anxiety-specific metacognitions. Given the role experiences of co...

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is considered the treatment of choice for paediatric anxiety disorders, yet there remains substantial room for improvement in treatment outcomes. This paper examines whether theory and research into the role of information-processing in the underlying psychopathology of paediatric anxiety disorders indicate possi...

Research has shown that anxiety may be transmitted through verbal information pathways, for example, when parents share their anxious cognitions with their child. Less is known about the influence of parental metacognitions, that is, beliefs regarding thoughts, on child anxiety. We explored the relations between metacognitions in mothers and their...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate reductions in negative automatic thoughts and metacognitive beliefs as predictors of treatment gains in CBT for childhood anxiety disorders. A sample of 44 clinically anxious children between 7 and 12 years of age, who underwent CBT, completed questionnaires assessing negative thinking, metacognitive belief...

Children’s understanding of the nature, origins and consequences of emotions has been intensively investigated over the last 30–40 years. However, few empirical studies have looked at the relation between emotion understanding and anxiety in children and their results are mixed. The aim of the present study was to perform a preliminary investigatio...

The aim of this study was to enhance the understanding of cultural and sample differences in the assessment of attachment by examining the factor structure of the Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R). The ECR-R is a self-report measure of adult romantic attachment dimensions. The present study used a Danish sample with the purpose of...

The metacognitive model and therapy has proven to be a promising theory and intervention for emotional disorders in adults. The model has also received empirical support in normal and clinical child samples. The purpose of the present study was to adapt metacognitive therapy to children (MCT-c) with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and create sug...

This study investigated attention control and attentional bias for emotional stimuli in children with anxiety disorders, compared with disorder-free children. Furthermore, it examined the effect of individual cognitive behavioral therapy on these attentional variables in anxious children. Participants included 22 anxious and 20 control children (ag...

A few studies have examined the relative contribution of insecure attachment and negative parental rearing behaviors on childhood anxiety, but none have examined if insecure attachment mediates the association between negative parental rearing behavior and anxiety. The present study investigated the direct, as well as the indirect, relation between...

Objective Specific parental behaviors and cognitions are associated with child anxiety. Studies informing us of the directionality of the associations are lacking. We investigated the effect of parental involvement in children's anxiety treatment on parental behaviors and cognitions. Method Children (N = 54, 7-12 years) and parents were randomly a...

Theoretical views and empirical findings suggest interrelations among attachment security, emotion dysregulation and anxiety in childhood and adolescence. However, the associations among the three constructs have rarely been investigated in children, and no study has yet addressed these associations in adolescence. The aim of the present study was...

The metacognitive model has increased our understanding of the development and maintenance of generalized anxiety disorders in adults. It states that the combination of positive and negative beliefs about worry creates and sustains anxiety. A recent review argues that the model can be applied to children, but empirical support is lacking. The aim o...

Parental rearing practices such as over-involvement are associated with childhood anxiety; however, little is known about the contribution of parental perceptions to child anxiety. This study explores the relationship between maternal and paternal perceptions of parenting and childhood anxiety. The perceived rearing behaviors and parental sense of...

Background: Little is known about the effect of case-formulation based cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) for anxious children. Aim: The present study explores the feasibility of case-formulation driven CBT for anxious children. Parents were involved in treatment as either co-facilitators (involved only as the child's assistants, treatment being...

Theoretical models of anxiety have been developed in adult populations. The applicability of these models in child samples has been assessed using downward extensions of the questionnaires developed to assess the proposed theoretical mechanisms. This poses a challenge, as children are still in the process of developing the skills that are being ass...

Individual differences in attention control are proposed to contribute to anxiety and depression. However, self-reported attention control, assessed on the Attentional Control Scale (ACS), appears to be a heterogeneous construct with separate components of focusing (e.g., concentrating, resisting distraction) and shifting (e.g., flexible switching...

An increasing number of studies has shown that emotion dysregulation plays a key role in relation to childhood anxiety. While gender differences are commonly associated with emotional competence, no study has yet examined whether the relation between emotion dysregulation and anxiety is the same for girls as it is for boys. The present study invest...

Early identification of anxiety among youth is required to prevent them from going unrecognised and untreated by mental health professionals. A precise identification of the young person's primary difficulty is also required to guide treatment programs. Availability of a valid and easily administrable assessment tool is crucial for identifying yout...

Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in children and adolescents, and are associated with aberrant emotion-related attention orienting and inhibitory control. While recent studies conducted with high-trait anxious adults have employed novel emotion-modified antisaccade tasks to examine the influence of emotional information on orienting and inhib...

Anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent psychiatric disturbances in childhood. None-the-less, they often go unrecognized and untreated, which puts the child at risk for developing additional difficulties, such as academic difficulties, depression, and substance abuse. Further knowledge and valid assessment tools are essential to identify at-...

Cognitive models of anxiety propose that anxiety is associated with an attentional bias for threat, which increases vulnerability to emotional distress and is difficult to control. The study aim was to investigate relationships between the effects of threatening information, anxiety, and attention control on eye movements. High and low trait anxiou...

Anxiety affects 10% of all children and disrupts educational, socio-emotional development and overall functioning of the child and family. Research has shown that parenting factors (i.e. intrusiveness, negativity, distorted cognitions) contribute to the development and maintenance of childhood anxiety. Recent studies have therefore investigated if...

This study investigated relationships between childhood anxiety, chronological age and threat processing biases. It used a cross-sectional design comparing younger and older children, separated using a median-split on trait anxiety scores into low-anxious versus moderately-anxious groups. Participants were 67 schoolchildren, aged 7–14 years, who co...

Anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric disorders in childhood. Nonetheless, theoretical knowledge of the development and maintenance of childhood anxiety disorders is still in its infancy. Recently, research has begun to investigate the influence of emotion regulation on anxiety disorders. Although a relation between anxiety disord...

Reinholdt-Dunne, M. L., Esbjørn, B. H., Høyer, M., Dahl, S., Boesen, A. J., Hansen, S. G. & Leth, I. (2011). Emotional difficulties in seventh grade children in Denmark. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 52, 433–439. The present study investigates the prevalence of emotional difficulties and quality of life in a sample of 834 children from 56 seve...

This study investigated the role of executive attention control in modulating selective processing of emotional information in anxiety. It was hypothesized that the combination of high anxiety and poor attention control would be associated with greater difficulty in ignoring task-irrelevant threat-related information. The study included both faces...