Context-Specific Freezing and Associated Physiological Reactivity as a Dysregulated Fear Response.

Buss, Kristin A.; Davidson, Richard J.; Kalin, Ned H.; Goldsmith, H. Hill

doi:10.1037/0012-1649.40.4.583

Cited by 168 publications

(205 citation statements)

References 78 publications

(115 reference statements)

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“…It also allowed new associations to emerge. Specifically, children who were consistently fearful across all of the indices of fearful temperament might be more sympathetically-reactive to the fear video than the children who were consistently non-fearful or uninhibited.Consistent with other studies using measures of pre-ejection period with young children, when all the children were included in the analysis, we did not observe a significant PEP response (Alkon et al, 2003;Buss et al, 2004; Talge et al, 2003). Furthermore, changes in PEP were not associated with either changes in vagal tone or heart rate in response to the fear video.…”

supporting

confidence: 90%

“…Nonetheless, the few studies reporting associations between PEP and fearful temperament in young children have not yielded strong associations. Thus, Buss et al (2004) found that shorter PEP (i.e., greater sympathetic activation) measured under baseline conditions was only marginally associated with "dysregulated" fear responses, or the display of fearfulness in non-threatening contexts, in a sample of toddlers. Buss, Goldsmith, & Davidson (2005) provided a partial replication of these findings in that greater levels of observed negative affectivity (i.e., fear and sadness) were again marginally associated with shorter PEP.…”

Section: Nih-pa Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…While fearful or inhibited children have been found to have higher home baseline cortisol levels compared to extremely uninhibited children (de Haan, Gunnar, Tout, Hart, & Stansbury, 1998;Kagan, Reznick, & Snidman, 1987;Schmidt et al, 1997) (Gunnar & Vazquez, 2006). In searching for possible reasons for these discrepancies, some have argued that hyper-responsivity of the HPA axis is more closely tied to freezing or extreme expressions of inhibition (Buss, Davidson, Kalin, & Goldsmith, 2004). However, others have suggested that inhibiting approach to novel events effectively reduces the child's contact with those events, and this buffers the child from activations of the HPA axis (Bruce, Davis, & Gunnar, 2002).…”

Section: Nih-pa Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nih-pa Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kagan (e.g., 1994) has argued that the explanation for their high and unvarying heart rates and their extremely inhibited behavior lies in a lower threshold for activation of amygdala-centered fear circuits which, in turn, activate the sympathetic nervous system, producing strong sympathetic drive on the heart (Snidman, 1989). Notably, estimates of associations between behavioral inhibition and heart rate activity are generally larger in samples of children selected for the extremes of inhibition (Reznick, Gibbons, Johnson, & McDonough, 1989), as other studies exploring variation within a typically-developing population of children have failed to observe such effects (Buss et al, 2004).Although others have pointed to sympathetic activity as the basis for the high and unvarying heart rates of extremely fearful or inhibited children, Porges (1991;1992) has argued that most of the variation in heart rate observed under the mild threat conditions imposed on children in the laboratory likely reflects variations in vagal mediation of heart rate. In addition, he has suggested that stress and fear vulnerability is expressed through low vagal or parasympathetic input to both the central nervous system and the cardiac system via the nucleus ambiguous arm of the vagus.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fearful temperament and stress reactivity among preschool‐aged children

Talge

Donzella

Gunnar

2008

Infant and Child Development

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In this study, we examined the relation between physiological stress-reactivity and temperamental fearfulness in 162 preschool-aged children. Both the autonomic and neuroendocrine arms of the mammalian stress system were examined. Larger stress responses were defined as greater sympathetic activation, parasympathetic withdrawal and cortisol increases to stressor tasks. Fearful temperament was examined using parent report and behavior in response to fear-evocative laboratory tasks. There was little evidence that larger sympathetic activation or parasympathetic withdrawal was associated with fearful temperament. Greater cortisol reactivity, however, was associated with fearful temperament. Additional analyses examined those children who were consistently fearful across all measures, and the results remained largely the same. However, there was some suggestion that consistently fearful compared to non-fearful children might be more likely to exhibit sympathetic activation to the fear-evocative stimuli. These findings provide support for the argument that fearful temperament is associated with greater stress reactivity in young children. Nonetheless the size of the associations was small and future studies will need to determine whether reactivity of stress-sensitive physiological systems contributes to the development of individual differences in fearful temperament or merely reflects these differences. Keywordstemperament; behavioral inhibition; cortisol; vagal tone; pre-ejection period; childrenThe role of temperamental fearfulness in individual differences in stress reactivity and regulation is of growing interest in developmental neuroscience (e.g., Buss et al., 2003;Kagan, Reznick, & Snidman, 1988) and biological psychiatry (Bakshi & Kalin, 2000;Smoller et al., 2005). This interest reflects an enhanced understanding of the neurobiology of both conditioned (LeDoux & Phelps, 2000) and unconditioned fear (Davis, Walker, & Lee, 1997) and belief that the distributed neural systems underlying acute expressions of fear also support more stable, temperamental variations in fearfulness (Rothbart, 1989). The distributed neural circuits that orchestrate fear behavior have outflows to both arms of the mammalian stress system (Charmandari, Tsigos, & Chrousos, 2005). Specifically, they activate both the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to support fight/flight reactions to threat and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) system, a counter-regulatory system that has multiple roles in adaptation.One role of the HPA system is to shape future behavioral and physiological responses to threat through regulating gene expression in fear-orchestrating brain regions such as the amygdala (Sapolsky, Romero, & Munck, 2000 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript temperamentally disposed to respond with fear to strange, novel or threatening events produce larger and more prolonged responses of the HPA system, then these responses themselves may operate to lower thresholds for fearful, inhi...

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supporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Nih-pa Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 82%