Parental Anxiety Prospectively Predicts Fearful Children’s Physiological Recovery from Stress

Abstract

Parental anxiety confers risk for the development of an anxiety disorder in children, and this risk may be transmitted through children's stress reactivity. Further, some children may be more vulnerable to reactivity in the presence of parent factors such as anxiety. In this study, we examined whether parents' anxiety symptoms prospectively predict school-aged children's physiological reactivity following stress, assessed through their electrodermal activity (galvanic skin response) during recovery from a performance challenge task, and whether this varies as a function of children's temperamental fearfulness. Parents and their children (N = 68) reported on their anxiety symptoms at Time 1 of data collection, and parents characterized the extent to which their children had fearful temperaments. At Time 2 children completed the performance challenge and two recovery tasks. Greater parental anxiety symptom severity at Time 1 predicted children's higher electrodermal response during both recovery tasks following the failure task. Further, these effects are specific to children with medium and high fearful temperament, whereas for children low in fearfulness, the association between parent anxiety and child reactivity is not significant. Findings provide additional evidence for the diathesis-stress hypothesis and are discussed in terms of their contribution to the literature on developmental psychopathology.

Language Matching Among Mother‐child Dyads: Associations with Child Attachment and Emotion Reactivity

“…Predictions are less clear with respect to preoccupied attachment (cf. Borelli et al, ); parents of preoccupied children might mirror contingently but not markedly (Fonagy et al, ), resulting either in high matching (if parents and children are highly mutually attuned) or low matching (if parents have difficulty separating their child's experience from their own) (Borelli et al, ). Due to our uncertainty that these variations in matching would translate to variability in LSM, we did not test hypotheses related to preoccupied child attachment.…”

Mother–child adrenocortical synchrony: Roles of maternal overcontrol and child developmental phase

“…The PCT is a standardized laboratory task used in prior investigations (see Borelli, Burkhart, Rasmussen, Smiley, & Hellemann, 2018;Borelli et al, 2015;Sichko, Borelli, Rasmussen, & Smiley, 2016;Smiley et al, 2016). It involves computer presentation of six 3-by 3-tile geometric puzzles adapted from the Block Design task in the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III (Wechsler, 1991).…”

“…Bowlby's attachment theory (1969) theory focused on two central types of parenting insensitivity thought to confer risk for maladjustment in children-failure to provide a secure base (autonomy support) and failure to provide a safe haven (comfort provision) for the developing infant. Overcontrol (OC)-parenting actions that constrain children's cognitions and emotional arousal states (Bögels & Brechman-Toussaint, 2006;Borelli et al, 2015)-is one form of insensitive parental care that undercuts the parent's ability to serve as a secure base for the child's exploration, resulting in failures to promote children's autonomy (Affrunti & Ginsburg, 2012;Grolnick & Pomerantz, 2009;Grusec & Davidov, 2007). Children parented with higher OC hold stronger perceptions that the world is a frightening place, have less motivation to explore, and express lower confidence in their ability to handle stress and control their behavior (Becker, Ginsburg, Domingues, & Tein, 2010;Bögels & Brechman-Toussaint, 2006;Bögels & van Melick, 2004;Chorpita, Brown, & Barlow, 1998;Deci & Ryan, 1985;Hudson, Comer, & Kendall, 2008;McLeod, Wood, & Weisz, 2007;Rapee, 1997;Wood, McLeod, Sigman, Hwang, & Chu, 2003).…”

Child and maternal attachment predict school‐aged children’s psychobiological convergence

“…Children completed the Performance Challenge Task (PCT; see Borelli, et al, 2015;Sichko, Borelli, Rasmussen, & Smiley, 2016), a laboratory stressor designed to increase children's negative emotion and autonomic arousal. The task required children to independently solve six puzzles adapted from the Block Design Task in the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children III (WISC III-R; Wechsler, 1974) as their mothers observed.…”