Assessment of Children’s Fears: Impact of Cognitive Level

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

This is an interesting study examining the age and giftedness differences in fear understanding.

 

 

-        Although the authors have done an exceptional job in defining fear and anxiety in the introduction, the links between age and giftedness and fear are not clear in the introduction. What are the theoretical or evidence gaps that the study aims to address?

-        The links between fear and anxiety could become clearer. Some specific fears are associated with specific anxiety disorders (e.g., separation anxiety disorder).

-        Regarding the literature review, I am not sure about the Piaget’s stage-like theory. As I am sure the authors know, there is a lot of critique to some of the theory’s aspects. For example, not all children need to traverse through the same stages. How does this critique tie with the division of the children into two age groups?

-        Is there any evidence on the measurement invariance of this scale between gifted vs normal IQ and between age groups that the authors can draw upon (perhaps at the composite subscale level rather than the item level)? This would ensure that the participants measure exactly the same thing and there are no meaning or metric differences.

-        The hypothesis 3 is more complex than the others and basically involves multiple embedded hypotheses about age differences. Could this become separate hypotheses or be stated as age differences in fear recognition?

-        Please describe a bit more the specifics of the power calculation.

-        The eta squared partial effect sizes should be explained according to Cohen’s interpretative framework.

-        I have also not been able to see any descriptive statistics (perhaps, in bar-charts) for the key variables per groups of interest. What are the means, SD, and range of scores per group?

-        Please provide a correlations matrix for gifted vs. normal IQ on the subscales of fear and per age group.

-        Has the latent factor structure of the fear inventory been tested?

-        Is it possible that different types of intelligence, as measured via the WISC subscales, differentiate the recognition of fear?

-        An ANOVA with a between- within (repeated measures) design is called mixed ANOVA right? What about the assumptions of this test? Have these assumptions been checked before proceeding with the main analyses?

-        Can we have the marginal means plot for the statistically significant interaction terms?

-        What does inf and sup mean in the 95% confidence interval? Is that lower and upper bound?

-        In the limitations, the authors could also recognise that the fear inventory might not exactly map onto common forms of fear expression given the ambiguity of individual differences in how people express fear.

-        An additional limitation is that fear is conceptualised and operationalised here as a trait-like construct. Nevertheless, fear, as all emotions, might be a momentary construct as well that is subject to situational-environmental influences.

-        Two-tailed p-values and effect sizes (Cohen’s d) could be added in Table 1.

-        The authors have done a very good job in placing the findings within the literature. Nonetheless, in the discussion section, some tentative explanations/ hypotheses could be formulated to explain both the null and the positive effects.

I hope the authors will find my comments helpful!

Kind regards

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We have taken into consideration all requests for additions, modifications or deletions that you have made. We thank you for your interest in our study and we hope that this new version of the article will be worthy of publication in the journal.

Best regards,

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review result

Manuscript entitled: Assessment of children's fears: impact of cognitive level

In this manuscript, the authors aim to contribute to the debate concerning the intensity of fears in high-IQ children. The authors present the results of research carried out in France and discuss them in light of current theoretical debates.

I was really impressed by the strong hypothesis behind this study, and I found this manuscript to be well-prepared in describing the experimental outcome. However, there are several concerns that the authors could further modify:

Procedure:

Question: If the authors can present the flow chart of the study, it would help the reader understand how the experiment or this study was conducted.  

Conclusion:

Question: The conclusion should be more summarized from the findings the authors found. This section should not include any further discussion.

Medthology:

Question: How can participants aged 5-8 sign their consent forms? Normally, if the participants are under 12 years old, we need the parents or guardians to sign the consent form for them.

Question: Even in the peer review version, you must declare the code and date/year of EC approval. We will not accept the manuscript without the code and date/year of EC approval.

 Question: Do all participants come from the same area, such as the same city? If not, how do the IQ tests apply to all participants in order to identify them as high-IQ and low-IQ?

 Question: When was this experiment conducted? For example, in what year?

 Question: Did all participants participate during the same period of time? For instance, did everyone participate within the same month or year?

 Question: How long will this study be conducted?

 References:

Question: Most of the references are older than 10 years. Within five years, the authors should refer to those citations. Those citations with more than 10 ears are not acceptable.

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We have taken into consideration all requests for additions, modifications or deletions that you have made. We thank you for your interest in our study and we hope that this new version of the article will be worthy of publication in the journal.

Best regards,

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I thank the authors for providing thorough point-by-point responses to my comments. The revised manuscript can be read clearly, the arguments are sound, and the methodological choices have been further supplemented by relevant sources. I just have two final minor queries:

First, it is not clear from the in-text information whether power analysis was conducted in a post-hoc manner. If so, post-hoc power analyses do not contribute much to the argument and can be misleading (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6738696/ and https://www.journalofsurgicalresearch.com/article/S0022-4804(20)30502-3/abstract).

 

Second, the term "evolution" gives the impression that the authors are talking about the change in the construct over the course of decades/centuries/time. However, I am sure that the authors wished to discuss the "development" of the relevant construct within individual children over time. So, I would recommend replacing "evolution" with "development".

 

My best wishes for a swift publication!

Author Response

I thank the authors for providing thorough point-by-point responses to my comments. The revised manuscript can be read clearly, the arguments are sound, and the methodological choices have been further supplemented by relevant sources. I just have two final minor queries:

Thank you very much for your time in reviewing this article, which has greatly contributed to its improvement.

First, it is not clear from the in-text information whether power analysis was conducted in a post-hoc manner. If so, post-hoc power analyses do not contribute much to the argument and can be misleading (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6738696/ and https://www.journalofsurgicalresearch.com/article/S0022-4804(20)30502-3/abstract).

We did not perform the statistical power post-hoc. Thank you for these very interesting articles. We have added a sentence to the Design 4.1. section to clarify this fact, and we have integrated one of the proposed articles.

Second, the term "evolution" gives the impression that the authors are talking about the change in the construct over the course of decades/centuries/time. However, I am sure that the authors wished to discuss the "development" of the relevant construct within individual children over time. So, I would recommend replacing "evolution" with "development".

Thank you, we've modified the document. You'll find the changes highlighted in blue in the revised manuscript.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Author(s)

Thank you for the great work. I do appreciate your feedback and improve the manuscript as suggested.

Regards,

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you for your expertise, which has helped us improve our article,

The authors