Psychology Commons^™

Mitigating Risk For Anxiety Among Preschool-Age Children Living In Poverty: Evaluating The Impact Of Adult-Provided Social Support On Autonomic Stress Reactivity, Brian Cory Wolff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Poverty increases children's exposure to stress, elevating their risk for developing patterns of heightened sympathetic and parasympathetic stress reactivity. Repeated patterns of high sympathetic activation and parasympathetic withdrawal place children at risk for anxiety disorders. This study evaluated whether providing social support to preschool-age children during mildly stressful situations helps reduce reactivity, and whether this effect partly depends on children's previously assessed baseline reactivity patterns. The Biological Sensitivity to Context (BSC) theory proposes that highly reactive children may be more sensitive than less reactive children to all environmental influences, including social support. In contrast, conventional physiological reactivity (CPR) theory contends …