Nicoline Normann

Short presentation

I am interested in the development, maintenance, and amelioration of childhood anxiety disorders. More specifically, I am intrigued by how children manage their negative thoughts, and the relation between such cognitive processes, developmental patterns, and anxiety. I am dedicated to help anxious children out of their misery. This gives me an intense motivation to create knowledge, raise awareness, and improve the conditions for people who suffer from anxiety on a daily basis.

The project title of my PhD study is "Identifying children’s cognitive avoidance strategies and their relations to anxiety". The aim of the study is to examine how children manage their negative thoughts and worries in both maladaptive and adaptive ways. Through quantitative, qualitative and quasi-experiments I aim to get a deeper understanding of how children react to their negative thoughts through various means of cognitive avoidance, e.g., thought suppression, distraction, or thought substitution, and how the children experience the effects of such strategies. With this research I hope to advance our understanding of how childhood anxiety is maintained and which factors may be relevant to specifically target during therapy.