Anxiety Sensitivity Moderates the Association Between Father-Child Relationship Security and Fear Transmission

Abstract

Observational fear learning can contribute to the development of fear-related psychopathologies, such as anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. Observational fear learning is especially relevant during childhood. Parent-child attachment and anxiety sensitivity modulate fear reactions and fear learning but their impact on observational fear learning has not been investigated. This study investigated how these factors contribute to observational fear learning in children. We examined this question among 55 healthy parent-child dyads. Children (8–12 years old) watched a video of their parent undergoing a direct fear conditioning protocol, where one stimulus (CS+Parent) was paired with a shock and one was not (CS−), and a video of a stranger for whom a different stimulus was reinforced (CS+Stranger). Subsequently, all stimuli were presented to children (without shocks) while skin conductance responses were recorded to evaluate fear levels. Our results showed that children more sensitive to anxiety and who had lower father-child relationship security levels exhibited higher skin conductance responses to the CS+Parent. Our data suggest that the father-child relationship security influences vicarious fear transmission in children who are more sensitive to anxiety. This highlights the importance of the father-child relationship security as a potential modulator of children’s vulnerability to fear-related psychopathologies.

Paternal expressed emotion influences psychobiological indicators of threat and safety learning in daughters: A preliminary study

“…Beyond main effects of EE and anxiety on child psychophysiological responding to threat, and consistent with growing evidence for Person × Environment interactions (Bilodeau-Houle et al, 2020;Gilissen et al, 2007;La Buissonnière-Ariza et al, 2019), EE and anxiety may exacerbate or attenuate the effects of one another. One possibility is that parents' attempts to socialize high anxious children through EE may be especially counterproductive because of these children's potential overarousal in the face of stressful circumstances.…”

“…However, observed effects were specific to the safety stimulus. Even though prior work largely supports hypotheses regarding trait and parenting influences on response to threat cues (Bilodeau-Houle et al, 2020;Lissek et al, 2005), the trend observed in the current study is also in line with previous findings that anxious individuals exhibit enhanced responding to conditioned safety cues (Lissek et al, 2005), and that individuals high in trait anxiety show stronger fear responding to the safety stimulus, but not the threat stimulus, during acquisition (Duits et al, 2015;Gazendam et al, 2013). In addition, some studies also observe that children exposed to extreme harsh par- Several strengths mitigate these limitations and offer preliminary data about the role fathers play in their daughters' threat and safety learning.…”

“…Of note, a recent study documented that children's anxiety sensitivity moderated the influence of father-child relationships on children's SCR during a form of indirect threat learning, or observational threat learning. Specifically, children with high anxiety sensitivity and less secure relationships with their fathers exhibited elevated SCR to vicariously experienced threat (Bilodeau-Houle et al, 2020). In the current investigation, two hypotheses with regard to paternal parenting were derived from the preceding studies.…”

“…Beyond anxiety, children's threat learning is sensitive to early exposure to chronic harsh parenting. For example, childhood abuse has been associated with increased startle reactivity to both stimulus types during conditioning, whether threatening or safe (Jovanovic et al, 2009), whereas other work with similar paradigms has observed effects of childhood maltreatment specific to threat cues (Bilodeau-Houle et al, 2020;McLaughlin et al, 2016) and safety cues (Wolitzky-Taylor et al, 2014), separately. Relatedly, maltreatment contributes to elevated fear overgeneralization, the induction of fear by a variety of stimuli, including safety cues, that resemble but are not directly related to the originally threatening event (Haddad et al, 2012;Thome et al, 2018).…”

Cognitive Reserve and Anxiety Interactions Play a Fundamental Role in the Response to the Stress

“…Studies have indicated that anxiety affects attentional capacity and learning (Helsen et al, 2011;Bilodeau-Houle et al, 2020), as well as stress responses in terms of cortisol levels. Fiksdal et al (2018) study, for example, showed that anxiety levels increased hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis reactivity to social stress.…”