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Biological And Contextual Predictors Of The Stability Of Behavioural Inhibition In Early Childhood, Victoria C. Johnson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Persistently elevated behavioural inhibition (BI) in children confers increased risk for anxiety disorders. However, little research has jointly examined exogenous and endogenous factors that may moderate BI stability in early childhood. To explore whether parent (i.e., parental overinvolvement, parent anxiety) and child (i.e., 5-HTTLPR and BDNF val66met genotype, positive emotionality) factors influenced the stability of early BI, a community sample of 371 preschoolers and their caregivers completed observational measures of child temperament, observational and questionnaire measures of parenting, and parent interviews for anxiety disorder history. Child BI at age 3 interacted with children’s 5-HTTLPR variants to predict age 5 BI; …