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The purpose of this study was to develop a reliable and valid questionnaire to assess spider fear in children. The Spider Phobia Questionnaire for adults was adapted for children by simplifying items and by assessing situations relevant to children. The SPQ for children (SPQ-C) was administered to two non-clinical samples of children aged 8 12. The first sample consisted of 586 Ss who filled in the SPQ-C twice, with a retest interval of 6-7 weeks. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were high. The second sample consisted of 669 children of which 28 spider phobic and 30 nonphobic girls were selected for the Behavioural Approach Test (BAT). The SPQ-C predicted BAT scores, thus supporting the validity of the questionnaire as a measure of spider fear. Norms for the SPQ-C, based on the total sample of children, are provided.

Interference effects on threat words in anxious subjects on the emotional Stroop task have generally been interpreted as evidence for mood-congruent attentional bias in anxiety states. However, several recent studies have yielded results that run contrary to this attentional bias explanation. The most important of these conflicting findings show that: (1) panic disorder patients displayed interference on threat words, but also on other emotional words, including positively valenced words, and (2) 'repressors' showed even greater interference than high trait anxious subjects. We propose an alternative explanation for these findings, in which both attentional bias and cognitive avoidance are assumed to operate in the emotional Stroop task, but in which cognitive avoidance is hypothesized to be chiefly responsible for the greater interference effects found in anxious subjects and 'repressors'. We suggest that future research into cognitive processes associated with anxiety states should employ a variety of experimental paradigms on the same subjects and include measures of 'defensiveness'.