Child psychiatry and human development
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Child Psychiatry Hum Dev · Oct 2015
Parental Anxiety Prospectively Predicts Fearful Children's Physiological Recovery from Stress.
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. ⋯ 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.