Browsing by Subject "Family accommodation"
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Item Child & adolescent anxiety and family accommodation : exploring the role of cognitive coping(2019-07-02) Morris, Joshua Adam; Stark, Kevin Douglas; Sallee, Allison; McCarthy, Christopher; Whittaker, TiffanyResearch demonstrates that family accommodation is positively correlated with the severity of childhood anxiety. This is partially due to important familial factors (e.g., attachment, parenting style, parental psychopathology) in the psychogenesis of childhood anxiety disorders. Additionally, the onset and maintenance of anxiety disorders is linked with how children and adolescents cognitively process information (e.g., interpretation and confirmation biases). Effective coping strategies, especially cognitive strategies, are a critical component to aid in the management of anxiety. Therefore, due to a need for effective parental modeling to acquire these strategies, it was hypothesized that higher levels of family accommodation reduce opportunities to acquire cognitive coping, which then results in more severe anxiety. Using data from a large anxiety treatment study evaluating the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy with an added parent component, ninety-three participants who met study criteria—primary diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, or Separation Anxiety Disorder—completed measures at baseline to assess levels of family accommodation, cognitive coping, and anxiety severity. After completing exploratory factor analyses and exploratory structural equation modeling to validate an experimental measure of cognitive coping, data was evaluated using structural equation modeling to assess the presence of the hypothesized mediation. Results indicated a replication of prior research supporting the relationship between family accommodation and anxiety severity. Results did not support the presence of the hypothesized mediation. Additional analyses were performed to assess potential reasons behind this finding. Data suggested that the mediator variable, cognitive coping, may have been poorly assessed via the experimental measure and, therefore, an inaccurate representation of the construct. This may have influenced the presented findings. Additionally, it is possible that cognitive coping does not explain the relationship between family accommodation and anxiety severity in youth.Item Child & adolescent social anxiety and family accommodation : exploring the role of coping(2017-05) Morris, Joshua Adam; Stark, Kevin DouglasResearch demonstrates that family accommodation is positively correlated with the severity of childhood anxiety. This finding is particularly interesting in the case of social anxiety, due to the role of the caregiver in the psychogenesis of the disorder. The prevalence of effective coping strategies is important in the mitigation of stress during childhood. Therefore, due to the need for effective parent modeling to acquire these strategies, it is hypothesized that higher levels of family accommodation reduce opportunities to acquire coping, which then results in more severe social anxiety. The proposed study seeks to use multiple regression to evaluate childhood coping skills as a mediator variable between family accommodation and the severity of social anxiety.Item The relationship between child anxiety, parent anxiety, and family accommodation(2013-05) Jones, Johnna DeAngelis; Stark, Kevin DouglasChildren and parents suffer from anxiety at high rates, but little is known regarding the role of family accommodation in the relationship between parent anxiety and child anxiety. Family accommodation is the process by which families accommodate patient symptoms by providing reassurance or by modifying family routines to avoid anxiety producing situations, which is in direct opposition to clinical therapeutics, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which focus on confronting rather than accommodating symptoms. It is important to identify family variables that are relevant to understanding the role of the parent in their child's anxiety, and family accommodation is promising because it has been implicated in impairment, symptom severity, and poor treatment outcomes in children and adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, less is known about family accommodation and anxiety. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to explore the possibility that family accommodation might mediate the relationship between parent anxiety and child anxiety by using survey methodology to acquire data from 85 parents via community and clinical sampling. Measures included "The Family Accommodation Scale Anxiety," "The State Trait Anxiety Inventory for Adults," and "The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders." Multiple regression analyses revealed that family accommodation fully mediated the relationship between parent anxiety and child anxiety, as evidenced by a statistically significant Sobel test of mediation and by a reduction in the parent anxiety child anxiety relationship from significant to non-significant. This study fills an important gap in the literature by providing empirical evidence that family accommodation plays an important role in mediating the relationship between parent anxiety and child anxiety. Implications include the potential for development of effective interventions for child anxiety by including focused treatment components designed to reduce and eliminate family accommodation.