Results

In the table above, we can see that even after partialling out the effects of age, gender and natural anxiety, the training had a significant effect on the subsequent bias score, F(1, 65) = 13.43, p < .001,  = .151 (95% CI: [0.027, 0.312]).

In terms of the covariates, age did not have a significant influence on the acquisition of interpretational biases. However, anxiety and gender did. If we look at the Coefficients table, we can use the beta values to interpret these effects. For anxiety (scared), b = 2.01, which reflects a positive relationship. Therefore, as anxiety increases, the interpretational bias also increases (this is what you would expect, because anxious children would be more likely to naturally interpret ambiguous situations in a negative way). If you draw a scatterplot of the relationship between scared and int_bias you’ll see a very nice positive relationship. For gender, b = 26.12, which again is positive, but to interpret this we need to know how the children were coded in the data editor. Boys were coded as 1 and girls as 2. Therefore, as a child ‘changes’ (not literally) from a boy to a girl, their interpretation biases increase. In other words, girls show a stronger natural tendency to interpret ambiguous situations negatively. This finidng is consistent with the anxiety literature, which shows that females are more likely to have anxiety disorders.

One important thing to remember is that although anxiety and gender naturally affected whether children interpreted ambiguous situations negatively, the training (the experiences on the alien planet) had an effect adjusting for these natural tendencies (in other words, the effects of training cannot be explained by gender or natural anxiety levels in the sample).

Have a look at the original article to see how Muris et al. reported the results of this analysis – this can help you to see how you can report your own data from an ANCOVA. (One bit of good practice that you should note is that they report effect sizes from their analysis – as you will see from the book chapter, this is an excellent thing to do.)