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Article Excerpt
In the study presented, the development of different fear regulation behaviors and their associations with preceding maternal sensitivity and depression is addressed. A sample of 64 mother-child pairs was examined at the children's ages of 4, 12, and 30 months. Four-month negative reactivity and 12- and 30- month behavioral inhibition and fear regulation behaviors were assessed using laboratory routines. Maternal sensitivity and depression were assessed by behavior observations and questionnaires, respectively. Four-month negative emotionality preceded 30-month behavioral inhibition. Passive fear-regulation behaviors showed significant continuity between 12 and 30 months but no relations with maternal characteristics. In contrast, active fear-regulation behaviors were significantly related to less maternal depression and high sensitivity but showed no continuity. These associations might reflect a more stable disposition underlying passive fear behaviors and a higher dependence on experience for the active fear behaviors.
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In recent years, much attention has been directed toward the concept of emotion regulation. Indeed, this concept has been shown to be helpful for studying the development of infant temperament and to better understand its formative parameters (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004). A theoretical background has been offered by Rothbart (1989), who distinguishes two biologically based components of temperament: reactivity and self-regulation. Reactivity means the motor, affective, autonomous, or endocrine arousability of the organism. Self-regulation is any process that serves to modulate reactivity in order to keep the arousal within an individually optimal range. Reactivity and self-regulation are intermingled, as reactivity affects the individual's urge for self-regulation, and the efficacy of the self-regulation alters the level of reactivity. Furthermore, they are presumed to be biologically determined as well as influenced by the child's experiences in the relationship with her or his caregiver.
With regard to the regulation of fear, Kagan and colleagues have concentrated on the concept of behavioral inhibition, that is, a child's tendency to react with fear and withdrawal in situations that contain an unknown stimulus or an unfamiliar person. Typically, the inhibited child interrupts her or his play activities, seeks proximity to the caregiver, and shows a high latency in approaching the stimulus, if at all. An innate low activation threshold of the amygdala has been postulated as the physiological foundation for behavioral inhibition (Garcia-Coll, Kagan, & Reznick, 1984; Kagan, 1999), and solid, long-term stability of this variable from 20 months onward has been demonstrated (Kagan, Reznick, & Snidman, 1987). Interestingly, high negative reactivity in the 4-month-old infant has been identified as a precursor of behavioral inhibition in toddlerhood (Kagan, 1992, 1999; Fox, Henderson, Rubin, Calkins, & Schmidt, 2001). However, most results were derived from extreme groups--comparing the 10-15% of the most inhibited with the same number of the least inhibited children--and could not be replicated in unselected samples (Kagan, Reznick, & Gibbons, 1989). One goal of the study presented here was to follow developmental trajectories from negative emotionality in the first months to behavioral inhibition/fear at 12 and 30 months, respectively, in an unselected sample.
By transferring Rothbart's model to the development of behavioral inhibition, it can be assumed that behavioral inhibition consists in the components' high innate reactivity and low emotion-regulation capacity and that the characteristic, at least in the regulation component, undergoes developmental changes affected by experiences within the relationship to the parent (Fox, Henderson, Marshall, Nichols, & Ghera, 2005). More specifically, it has been posited that maternal depression and the mother's sensitivity toward the infant influence the developing emotional regulation of fear (Gianino & Tronick, 1988; Sroufe, 1995). However, only a few empirical studies have addressed these relationships, and the results are not completely consistent.
Belsky, Fish, and Isabella (1991) found high sensitivity in infancy to be associated with a decline in negative emotionality, and Pauli-Pott, Mertesacker, and Beckmann (2004) found high sensitivity related to less withdrawal and negative emotionality at 12 months. Park, Belsky, Putnam, and Crnic (1997), however, found low parental sensitivity to be associated with subsequent behavioral inhibition in the 3-year-old, and Partridge (2003) found behavioral inhibition in somewhat older children to be associated with parental self-reports of less empathy and less positive parenting. In 25-month-old children, Rubin, Hastings, Stewart, Henderson, and Chen (1997) demonstrated that consistent behavioral inhibition was associated with oversolicitous or unresponsive behavior of the mother and her high intrusive control.
As regards maternal depression, Pauli-Pott et al. (2004) found this characteristic to be associated with 12-month-olds' withdrawal behavior in a stranger approach procedure. Kochanska and Radke-Yarrow (1992), however, could not show any association between maternal depression and behavioral inhibition in 5-year-old children. Kochanska (1991) observed 24- to 42-month-old children and their depressed or nondepressed mothers in different fear-eliciting situations. By distinguishing between different behavioral components of inhibition such as proximity to the mother or facial fear expression, specific correlations to the mothers' psychopathology were obtained.
Taken together, the few studies that investigated the associations between preceding maternal sensitivity and depression and behavioral inhibition yielded relatively inconsistent results. As can be inferred from Kochanska's (1991) approach, a way to better understand the putative relations might be by examining different fear-expression behaviors. Indeed, several authors pointed to the existence of different kinds of...
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