What you see has a lot to do with what you feel.
This isn’t a new idea. Cognitive psychologists and Buddhists agree that the root of suffering is misperception.
But why are some so adept at seeing the glass as half full when, to others, it looks never better than half empty? Likely suspects, according to some researchers, are parents.
Here’s the explanation for one form of suffering: anxiety. It goes like this: overprotective caregivers (mainly mothers) cause their children to see the world as threatening and to feel they need protection. This misperception consequently makes children anxious about everyday situations.
A group of researchers from the UK University of Southampton have tested this idea. They recruited 129 local children between the ages of nine and 14 years and showed each one a picture of a face that was happy, angry, or neutral.
Then they were asked whether the particular face was present in an image that included a number of other faces. This procedure was repeated times with different types of faces (happy, sad, or neutral) and different numbers of “distractor” faces. They also asked children and their mothers about their experiences of separation anxiety (anxiety that arises when children are separated from a caregiver), and asked mothers a number of additional questions to assess whether they were over-protective of their child.
The research team found that kids over the age of ten whose mothers tended to be somewhat over-protective found the angry faces more quickly than children with more relaxed mothers. Also, the children who were quicker to find the angry faces were also more likely than other children to report symptoms of separation anxiety. Focusing on the angry faces more so than the other faces is akin to seeing the glass as being half empty.
These findings might suggest that parents have a great deal of influence over how their children perceive the world. However, this was small study. Future research would need to look at a larger group of families and to collect information from them over time to confirm that the over-protective parenting precedes children’s hyper-vigilance for all things negative, and that the negativity leads to later anxiety.
Future research would also need to rule out that a genetic predisposition to anxiety is not the actual cause of the behavior of parent and child alike.
• Summary of “Do anxiety-related attentional biases mediate the link between maternal over involvement and separation anxiety in children?” by Gisela Perez-Olivas, Jim Stevenson and Julie A. Hadwin in Cognition and Emotion, January 2008, Volume 22, Issue 3, pp. 509-521.