Nicoline Normann defends her PhD thesis at the Department of Psychology
Title
'Anxious Children’s Strategies for Managing their Worry'
Time and place
Monday 29 June at 13:00.
The defense will be online via Zoom.
Click here to join the online defense.
Password: 865686.
Assessment committee
- Associate Professor Stig Poulsen, The Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair)
- Professor Samantha Cartwright-Hatton, University of Sussex - Brighton, United Kingdom
- Assistant Professor Charlotte Wilson, Trinity College - Dublin, Ireland
Abstract
Worry is a transdiagnostic feature of anxiety disorders known to cause interference in the daily lives of children. Delineating how children attempt to manage or regulate their worry processes may improve our cognitive-behavioral models of childhood anxiety and be key to understanding how to best alleviate anxious children’s worry.
In an article-based thesis, Nicoline Normann investigates the role of worry regulation strategies in children with anxiety disorders. The first study is a meta-analytic review of the efficacy of metacognitive therapy, which is a type of therapy that directly targets worry and the individual’s attempts to deal with worry. The second study is a qualitative investigation of anxious children’s attempts to do away with worry. The third study explores parents’ attempts to manage their anxious child’s worry through a series of qualitative interviews. The fourth study presents the development of an instrument for measuring the cognitive attentional syndrome, a key concept of the metacognitive model in children, which measures worry regulation strategies amongst others.
A copy of the PhD thesis will be available at the Faculty of Social Sciences' library.