MIZZOU NEWS

Examining the Root of Childhood Anxiety

Three weeks into the new school year, most kindergartners have conquered their fears of spending most of their day in a new environment. Some children, however, continue to experience extreme anxiety and cannot find comfort and security. They cry and yearn for the familiarity of their parents’ arms. A developmental psychologist at the University of Missouri-Columbia wants to help parents and teachers understand why small children feel profound anxiety in these situations.

“After a few weeks, school should be non-threatening,” says Kristin Buss, assistant professor of psychology at MU. “If kids are still feeling strong anxiety, it may impede their development.”

Surprisingly, as many as one-third of all toddlers with fearful dispositions are at risk to develop social anxiety disorders. Buss argues that traditional methods of behavioral observation haven’t accurately identified the number of children who may have propensities toward anxiety disorders. She thinks the at-risk number could be significantly higher.

In experiments, researchers exposed 80 24-month-old children to strangers in various contexts, all of which were designed to elicit certain behavior. In one context the children were sitting in high chairs when a male stranger entered the room. As predicted, many children exhibited fear, either by crying or looking toward their mothers for security. The elicited behavior in another context, however, revealed more important findings for Buss. In this context, the children were simply participating in free play on the floor with a toy when the male stranger walked into the room. Overall, the children were less threatened in this context, because, as Buss believes, their mobility was not restricted by a high chair.

In the free play context, 12 children (15 percent of the sample) responded with behavior that Buss identified as extremely fearful. Of these 12 children, however, only three displayed behavior, such as crying, that 20 years of traditional developmental psychology would identify as extremely fearful. Buss was especially interested in the behavior of these extreme children who “froze” when the stranger entered the room.

Buss said there were clear connections between the long periods of this frozen state and indices of high stress. For example, in saliva samples taken from these children, high levels of cortisol were detected. Cortisol is a stress hormone released from adrenal glands following a signal from the brain during periods of acute distress or anxiety. These findings cause Buss to believe there are inherited, biological substrates of personality that predispose children to certain behavior.

Buss hopes the experiment’s findings will contribute to a better understanding of the less obvious behavior from toddlers, behavior that developmental psychologists might recognize as signs that a child will later experience an anxiety disorder. The researchers’ findings are under review by Developmental Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association.

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Last Update: November 15, 2007