Mentor: Elizabeth Kiel, Ph.D.

Temperament represents early-appearing, biologically-based, individual differences in emotion behaviors (Goldsmith et al., 1987). Temperament provides a framework for understanding child behavior and predicting developmental outcomes, including anxiety symptoms. Temperament includes emotion reactivity (arousal in certain nervous systems in the body) and self-regulation, the processes that modulate reactivity (Goldsmith et al., 1987). Psychopathology can be conceptualized as reactivity that is so strong or difficult that it exceeds regulatory systems. Anxiety is associated with high physiological arousal and a misinterpretation of non-threatening stimuli as threatening. Kagan and colleagues (1984) identified the temperament type of behavioral inhibition, characterizing children who exhibit greater levels of fear and physiological arousal during unfamiliar events (Kagan et al., 1984). Temperament (i.e., behavioral inhibition) affects regulatory behaviors in the context of high-threat situations that typically elicit fear (Buss & Goldsmith, 1998; Kagan et al., 1984). Dysregulated fear is a modified assessment of behavioral inhibition and fearful temperament, defined as showing high fear in low-threat contexts. Dysregulated fear better distinguishes vulnerability to the development of anxiety disorders (Buss, 2011) relative to inhibition alone, but dysregulation has primarily been assessed in toddlerhood. If it can be identified in infancy, prevention of anxiety could occur earlier in development. The current study will examine one hundred and sixty-nine infants and their mothers who participated in an ongoing longitudinal study. Infants participated in a puppet show task from which multiple fear and distress behaviors were coded. Mothers reported on infants’ anxiety risk with the Infant Toddler Social-Emotional Assessment (Carter & Briggs-Gowan, 2001) and the Toddler Behavior Assessment Questionnaire (Goldsmith, 1996) at age two. Bivariate correlations showed significant correlations among behavior codes, specifically vocal distress, gaze aversion, and escape behavior, and were used to create a dysregulated fear composite. Multiple regression analyses showed that this dysregulated fear composite did not signfiicantly predict anxiety scores at age two, controlling for age one anxiety and covariates (mom age and child sex). Although dysregulated fear did not significantly predict anxiety, more studies in the future should aim to analyze multiple contexts and larger array of fearful behaviors in order to examine anxiety risk in infancy through the construct of dysregulated fear.

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