Journal of Clinical Psychology Practice

Knowledge about children’s fears and the clinical phenomenology of anxiety disorders has increased dramatically over the past three decades following the expansion of the anxiety and phobic disorders categories in the DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) and the development of the Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (FSSC-R; Ollendick, 1983). The FSSC-R, the most frequently used fear inventory (Silverman & Hicks-Carmichael, 1999), is an 80-item self-report questionnaire with five factors of fears: danger/death, failure/criticism, the unknown (e.g., going to bed in the dark), small animals, and medical (Ollendick, 1983; Ollendick, King, & Frary, 1989). Research involving a variety of youth samples indicates that most of the top ten fears across samples are related to bodily harm or physical threat (Muris & Ollendick, 2002; Ollendick, 1983; Ollendick, King, & Frary, 1989). Results from the FSSC-R demonstrate robust and generally similar patterns in the frequency and intensity of fears across age, gender, and Summary