itive behavioral procedures have been utilized to help children with anxiety disorders where cognitive behavioral procedures is a term used to refer to an action-oriented form of psychosocial intervention that assumes that maladaptive, or faulty, thinking patterns cause maladaptive behavior and "negative" emotions. Cognitive behavioral treatment, therefore, focuses on changing an individual's thoughts (cognitive patterns) in order to change his or her behavior and emotional state.
One cognitive behavioral procedure used to help children with anxiety disorders is self-talk which has been found to be between 66 percent to 72 percent effective in most children with the effects lasting over a considerable period of time (Kendell 40-46). Essentially, the self-talk intervention consists of some form of having children stop negative statements about themselves and substitute positive statements.
Over the years, self-talk interventions have been found to be not only quite effective but effective for diverse types of childhood anxiety, producing several positive outcomes in addition to reducing anxiety levels. For example, Prins and Hanewald (1999) found that self-talk interventions for highly anxious children was positively correlated with reducing negative thoughts leading to anxiety, although it did not improve their task performance generally. Kassler and Breme (1998) found that self-talk helped to reduce, anxiety and avoidant behavior as well as socially insecure behavior in a sample of German children.
Kendell (40-67) lists several positive outcomes that have been associated with the use of self-talk interventions for children. These can be summarized as follows:
1. Self-talk interventions can reduce anxiety and pain in hospitalized children.
2. Self-talk interventions can increase self-esteem
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