Depression and anxiety are highly prevalent and disabling emotional disorders. While a number of risk factors have been identified, the exposure of children to their parent’s cognitive biases is a possible mechanism through which risk can be conferred. Attentional biases towards negative information are one such cognitive mechanism which has been well-established as distinct in individuals with mood and anxiety disorders. Perhaps then, the increased risk of experiencing anxiety and depression in the offspring of parents with a history of emotional disorders may be attributed to the transmission of such dysfunctional attentional biases from parents to their children. As such, children of parents with emotional disorders may be “cognitive vulnerable” to developing mood and anxiety disorders throughout their lifetime. This study aims to investigate the relationship between the attentional biases of mothers with and without a history of emotional disorders, and the attentional biases of their non-disordered children, both across time and between the two distinct groups. Further, the study aims to investigate the relationship between both maternal and child attentional biases, and the development of anxious symptomology across 12 months in children at “high risk” or “low risk” for developing anxiety or mood disorders, based on their mother’s diagnostic status. The first chapter of this paper provides a summary of the major literature in this area. The research is reviewed firstly with respect to general aspects of emotional disorders and their risk factors as background and context for the current study. Then literature is reviewed that relates specifically to the hypotheses and methods used in the current study on the relationship between maternal attentional biases, their offspring’s attentional biases, and offspring anxious symptomology for a sample of mothers with emotional disorders and their children (high risk) in comparison to those of never-disordered mothers and their children (low risk). The second chapter of this study is a complete journal article manuscript, including methodology, results and interpretations of the research findings. The following manuscript’s style and formatting is aimed for submission to the Depression and Anxiety journal.