9.4% of children ages 3-17 have been diagnosed with an Anxiety disorder. An illness so prevalent in our society’s youth should have an effective method for identifying it. Some behaviors have been identified to suggest potential early flags among children developing anxious behavioral patterns. Inhibited temperament is a behavior that in literature has been found to be an excellent predictor of childhood anxiety problems. Conceivably, inhibited fear in contexts where this behavior is less common can be tied to anxiety more strongly. This is known as dysregulated fear, a pattern of behavior that has already been correlated to toddler anxiety. This study aimed to establish a correlation between dysregulated fear and anxiety problems among an older age group of preschoolers. Preschoolers are particularly of interest since this age group may exhibit stress induced behaviors more frequently as they begin their formal education. Degrees of shyness of the children when faced with episodes of varying threat levels were identified by coders and scored. Then the correlation was investigated using the Preschool Anxiety Scale as a diagnostic factor to determine whether each participant had clinically relevant anxiety or not. We found that episodes of high threat contexts actually negatively predicted anxiety, while episodes of low threat contexts positively predicted anxiety. Therefore, children who displayed more shyness in episodes that were deemed less stressful by the majority of subjects, were more likely to have clinically relevant anxiety. This agreed with our hypothesis that dysregulated fear can be a predictor of anxiety problems in preschoolers as well. The future direction of this research should move toward longitudinal study models to investigate how these diagnoses are upheld later in life and if these patterns of dysregulated fear do in fact correlate with adult anxiety diagnoses.
Author: Cara Gilmore
Advisor: Elizabeth Kiel, Psychology
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