DOES SOCIAL ANXIETY INCREASE WITH AGE?

One of the impressions in the literature on children's social anxiety is that young (preadolescent) children are not socially anxious and that social anxiety begins to manifest itself at adolescence and then increases with age. However there seems to be little direct research evidence to substantiate this claim. A questionnaire to assess feared outcomes in children and adolescents was therefore administered to 1415 children between the ages of 6 and 16 years. The results showed that worry about social threat did not increase with age and the content of the feared social outcomes also remained relatively constant over the age span. Childhood anxiety has been an under studied area until recently. Although the content of children's fears has been researched for the last one hundred years (Gullone, 1992), because the stimulus content of fear changes with age, it has often been assumed that childhood anxiety is transient. However recent epidemiological studies have found the incidence of anxiety disorders to be the most prevalent psychological disorder in children (Anderson, Williams, McGee & Silva, 1987; Kashani & Orvaschel, 1990, similar to adults (Myers, et al., 1984; Regier, et al., 1984). However anxiety in children and adolescents, despite the recent increase in research, still seems to go mainly undetected in schools, especially in early childhood. Perhaps this is understandable because anxiety as an internalising disorder affects only the individual child and the family, in contrast to externalising disorders which often involv