Features of fears expression among preschool children

The emotional sphere is significant for the mental and social development of preschool children. We consider the main causes of children’s fears; the role of parents in their appearance and consolidation. We analyze the features of actual fears in preschool children with mental retardation and normative development. The empirical study (the ascertaining stage) was performed on a sample of 31 subjects (6–7 years old) using diagnostic tools such as: technique of “Choosing the Most Terrible Picture” (T. V. Lavrentiev), test “Fears in Houses” (modified by M.A. Panfilova), projective method “My Family”. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the results allowed to identify 6 groups of dominant fears among preschool children: medical fears (fear of doctors, injections, blood, getting sick, getting infected), night fears (fear of being alone, terrible dreams, darkness), fear of natural disasters (fear of storms, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, war, fire), specific fears (fear of darkness, height, depth, confined space, pain), social fears (fear of being late, parents, punishment, large areas), fear for their own lives and the lives of parents.

Coolie Therapeutics: Labor, Race, and Medical Science in Tropical Australia

This essay considers the biomedical framing of labor in tropical Australia from the late-nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century. This entails critical inquiry into racialized estimates of labor capacity or fitness, as well as skeptical examination of medical assumptions of risk and danger. Racial theories and medical conjectures have constituted flexible analytic toolkits that might adjust, adapt, and justify a variety of exploitative labor practices in Australia’s tropical north. Debates about coolie or indentured labor were never simply economic calculations: They also concerned notions of races and their proper places, and expressed particular moral sensibilities and medical fears. Thus labor history becomes entangled with histories of racial formation and of science and medicine

Fears in anxious children

IntroductionFear is a distressing emotion aroused by a risk or a damage, real or imaginary. Fears have a warning function against dangers. Nevertheless, fear can also become in one of the most limiting elements of a person's life.ObjectivesTo characterize the profile of fears presented in a sample of 19 children, aged between 8 and 13 years old, who had previously been diagnosed with one of the following: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Separation Anxiety Disorder or Social Phobia.Material and methodsThe sample was taken from patients who participated in a cognitive-behavioral group therapy. The Spanish version of the Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (FSSC-R) questionnaire was employed. The FSSC-R asks children to indicate on a 3-point scale (‘none’, ‘some’, ‘a lot’) how much they fear 80 specific stimuli or situations. Five basic categories of fears can be stablished: failure and criticism (17 items); the unknown (17 items); minor injury and small animals (13 items); danger and death (16 items); medical fears (5 items).ResultsThe sample includes 19 children: 12 boys (63.2%) and 7 girls (36.8%). The median age is 10.74 years. The sample shows 15 excessive fears on average (those scored as ‘a lot’). Girls show higher rates of excessive fears than boys: 19 versus 13. The most common fears were ‘being hit by a car or truck’, ‘bombing attacks. Being invaded’, ‘a burglar breaking into our house’ and ‘falling from high places’.ConclusionsMost common excessive fears belong to danger and death category. Females report more fears than males.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Covert fears, anxiety and depression in congenital heart disease

This study compared anxiety, fears, depression and behavioural problems as occurring in children with congenital heart disease, comparing them with samples of normal children. It further considered the influence of maternal anxiety, as well as analyzing a subgroup of children with cyanotic forms of congenital heart disease to determine if they were at higher risk than acyanotic children for the problems identified.MethodWe recruited 40 consecutive children with congenital heart disease without obvious psychoso-cial problems from the Cardiology clinic at the Alberta Children‘s Hospital. Of the 40 children, 39 families consented to have the children participate, of which 24 were cyanotic and 15 acyanotic. Children completed the revised versions of the Fear Survey Scale-Revised and the Child Manifest Anxiety Scale as well as the Child Depression Inventory. Mothers completed the Child Behaviour Checklist, and the State Trait Anxiety Scale.ResultsChildren with congenital heart diseases demonstrated more medical fears, and more physiological anxiety, than the normative samples. More specifically, children with cyanotic forms of congenital heart disease demonstrated more fears of the unknown, physiological anxiety, depression, and delinquent behaviors than the acyanotic children with congenital heart disease. Mothers of the children with cyanotic forms of congenital heart disease scored higher on both the state and trait scales, with higher maternal anxiety correlating with higher anxiety, medical fears and behavioral problems in the child.ConclusionIn a clinical setting, children with congenital heart diseases who do not present with psychological adjustment problems are still at risk for covert physiological anxiety, medical fears, depression and behavioral problems. The children with cyanotic malformations represent a subgroup at higher risk for these problems, which may be further exacerbated by increased maternal anxiety.