The Effect of Logical Thinking Error on the Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Disorders in Children

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of logical thinking error on symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorders. We revised the Children's Cognitive Error Scale (CCES), which measures logical thinking errors in elementary school children. Also, we investigated the effect of logical thinking error on Spence Children's Anxiety Scale and Depression Self-Rating Scale for Children. First, the depressive situations in which children feel depressed were collected by using free description answers of 217 elementary school children. Among those situations, the ones matched the anxious situation of original CCES were retained. As a result, 9 anxious and depressive situations were extracted. Second, as a result of confirmatory factor analysis of data from 452 elementary school children, 17 items of CCES-R were confirmed to load on single factor. Test-retest reliability and Cronbach's alpha coefficient were high enough (.78 for test-retest and .85 for alpha). Third, result of analysis using the data from 635 elementary school children revealed that logical thinking error predicted both anxiety and depressive symptoms. Therefore, children who have logical thinking errors showed severe symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorders. Finally, directions for future research are discussed.