Skip to main content
Download PDF
- Main
Trajectories of Change in Youth Anxiety During Cognitive—Behavior Therapy
- Peris, Tara S;
- Compton, Scott N;
- Kendall, Philip C;
- Birmaher, Boris;
- Sherrill, Joel;
- March, John;
- Gosch, Elizabeth;
- Ginsburg, Golda;
- Rynn, Moira;
- McCracken, James T;
- Keeton, Courtney P;
- Sakolsky, Dara;
- Suveg, Cynthia;
- Aschenbrand, Sasha;
- Almirall, Daniel;
- Iyengar, Satish;
- Walkup, John T;
- Albano, Anne Marie;
- Piacentini, John
- et al.
Published Web Location
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038402Abstract
Objective
To evaluate changes in the trajectory of youth anxiety following the introduction of specific cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) components: relaxation training, cognitive restructuring, and exposure tasks.Method
Four hundred eighty-eight youths ages 7-17 years (50% female; 74% ≤ 12 years) were randomly assigned to receive either CBT, sertraline (SRT), their combination (COMB), or pill placebo (PBO) as part of their participation in the Child/Adolescent Anxiety Multimodal Study (CAMS). Youths in the CBT conditions were evaluated weekly by therapists using the Clinical Global Impression Scale-Severity (CGI-S; Guy, 1976) and the Children's Global Assessment Scale (CGAS; Shaffer et al., 1983) and every 4 weeks by blind independent evaluators (IEs) using the Pediatric Anxiety Ratings Scale (PARS; RUPP Anxiety Study Group, 2002). Youths in SRT and PBO were included as controls.Results
Longitudinal discontinuity analyses indicated that the introduction of both cognitive restructuring (e.g., changing self-talk) and exposure tasks significantly accelerated the rate of progress on measures of symptom severity and global functioning moving forward in treatment; the introduction of relaxation training had limited impact. Counter to expectations, no strategy altered the rate of progress in the specific domain of anxiety that it was intended to target (i.e., somatic symptoms, anxious self-talk, avoidance behavior).Conclusions
Findings support CBT theory and suggest that cognitive restructuring and exposure tasks each make substantial contributions to improvement in youth anxiety. Implications for future research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database RecordMany UC-authored scholarly publications are freely available on this site because of the UC's open access policies. Let us know how this access is important for you.
Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Enter the password to open this PDF file:
File name:
-
File size:
-
Title:
-
Author:
-
Subject:
-
Keywords:
-
Creation Date:
-
Modification Date:
-
Creator:
-
PDF Producer:
-
PDF Version:
-
Page Count:
-
Page Size:
-
Fast Web View:
-
Preparing document for printing…
0%