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...