This text is part of the special Research section
According to recent studies, the vulnerability of boys to anxiety may be underestimated compared to that of girls. Similarly, certain factors can make children more likely to learn fear from their parents. In the laboratories of psychology professor Marie-France Marin, researchers dissect the development of anxiety and fear in children.
It is often around puberty that many anxiety disorders are detected. During this period, young girls are moreover twice as likely to receive a diagnosis than boys. Anxiety goes hand in hand with spikes in the secretion of cortisol, the stress hormone.
Are the patterns of this hormone the result of anxiety disorders or a vulnerability factor that can lead to the development of a disorder? This is one of the big questions that arise around the onset of anxiety disorders, observes Marie-France Marin, professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Quebec in Montreal and holder of the Canada Research Chair on hormonal modulation of cognitive and emotional functions. The latter has developed a unique research niche in the province by focusing on the interactions between trauma, stress and hormones.
To try to answer this, a study with 114 children aged 8 to 12 was conducted by postdoctoral fellow Catherine Raymond, under the supervision of Mme Marine. To find out their degree of sensitivity to anxiety, the children answered questionnaires. They were then exposed to a stressful event, namely an oral presentation to be made in front of a jury. The researchers then measured their cortisol secretion as well as their perception of their stress using new questionnaires. And the results obtained are surprising.
“You could say that stress doesn’t affect boys,” explains M.me Marine. But that’s not what is shown in the cortisol results, because boys who are vulnerable to anxiety have a very high reactivity to the stressor. »
While no correlation was observed between the degree of vulnerability and cortisol secretion during oral presentation in young girls, this correlation was observed in boys. On the other hand, despite having a cortisol level similar to that of the boys, the young girls reported a much higher degree of stress after the presentation.
“This goes hand in hand with the idea that our boys are little conditioned to talk about their emotions, to report their level of stress, explains Marie-France Marin. Just because they don’t say it doesn’t mean they don’t feel it! You don’t just have to trust what people say, you also have to trust what the body says. And here, what it says is that there are young people who are vulnerable, and if we just rely on what they are going to tell us, we may be missing out a subgroup to which more attention should be paid. »
fear in children
In another project, Marie-France Marin’s team focused on the learning of fear by observation in children. The results of this study, conducted by Alexe Bilodeau-Houle during his master’s project, were published in February in the journal Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
“Learning fear is not necessarily something negative, it’s something that is adaptive and important,” says Alexe Bilodeau-Houle. When a child is afraid, he will run to seek safety from his parent. The attachment system and the fear system are two systems that develop together. However, [l’apprentissage de la peur] may be the basis for the transmission of anxiety or fear in families. »
After developing a protocol to study observational fear learning, the researchers analyzed the factors that can potentially influence this learning, such as physiological concordance. “If we were face to face, our heartbeats would sync up,” explains Alexe Bilodeau-Houle. [Cette proximité fait en sorte que] the child and the mother will be in physiological concordance. If the mother is afraid of spiders, there is a greater chance that the child will develop a fear of spiders. »
According to the results, children who are more anxious or who are in high physiological concordance with their parent are more likely to experience fear in the face of their parent’s fear responses when they have an insecure attachment relationship. The researchers are now working to understand the learning of fear in children growing up with parents suffering from anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.
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