Moderators of Outcome for Youth Anxiety Treatments: Current Findings and Future Directions

ABSTRACT

Objective: To improve outcomes and create more personalized interventions, the field has sought to identify moderators of treatment response (variables that specify which treatments work for whom and under what conditions).

Method: The current review examines moderators of youth anxiety treatments.

Results: The majority of studies to date have examined variables of convenience, including demographics (age, sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status), pretreatment youth clinical characteristics (anxiety severity, principal diagnosis, comorbidity) and pretreatment parent variables (parent psychopathology, parenting). Findings indicate few consistent moderators.

Conclusions: Future directions are discussed, including (a) group to individual generalizability, (b) power considerations, and (c) updates to study design and measure selection.

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Disclosure Statement

Dr. Kendall receives royalties from the sales of materials related to the treatment of anxiety in youth. Ms. Norris has no disclosures to report.

Notes

¹ Although moderation refers to interaction, several studies are included in this review that establish moderation via chi-square analyses. These studies were included given the limited number of findings reported in the literature.

² This special issue focuses on youth with anxiety disorders. Consistent with the DSM-5, studies including youth with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) are not reviewed, although reviews can be found elsewhere (e.g., McGuire et al., 2015; Turner et al., 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [F31MH123038].