The present study examined the psychometric properties of the Disgust Emotion Scale for Children (DES-C). Principal components analysis of the DES-C data revealed five factors reflecting disgust toward (a) rotting foods, (b) injection and blood, (c) odors, (d) mutilation and death, and (e) animals, which were largely in keeping with the intended…

The present study examined age-related patterns in children's anxiety-related interpretations and internal attributions of physical symptoms. A large sample of 388 children aged between 4 and 13 years completed a vignette paradigm during which they had to explain the emotional response of the main character who experienced anxiety-related physical…

Disgust is a basic emotion that is thought to play a role in the etiology of certain types of specific phobias, like animal phobias. Two experiments were conducted in which 9- to 14-year-old children were exposed to disgust-related, cleanliness-related, and threat-related information about unknown animals. It was investigated to what extent these…

Emotional and parent-based reasoning refer to the tendency to rely on personal or parental anxiety response information rather than on objective danger information when estimating the dangerousness of a situation. This study investigated the prospective relationships of emotional and parent-based reasoning with anxiety symptoms in a sample of…

A previous study by Muris, Merckelbach, and Van Spauwen [1] demonstrated that children display emotional reasoning irrespective of their anxiety levels. That is, when estimating whether a situation is dangerous, children not only rely on objective danger information but also on their "own" anxiety-response. The present study further examined…