Infant temperament and anxious symptomsin school age children

Abstract

A group of 164 children from different infant temperament categories were seen at 7 years ofage for a laboratory battery that included behavioral and physiological measurements. The majorresults indicated that children who had been classified as high reactive infants at 4 months of age,compared with infants classified as low reactive, (a) were more vulnerable to the development ofanxious symptoms at age 7 years, (b) were more subdued in their interactions with a femaleexaminer, (c) made fewer errors on a task requiring inhibition of a reflex, and (d) were morereflective. Further, the high reactives who developed anxious symptoms differed from the highreactives without anxious symptoms with respect to fearful behavior in the second year and, atage 7 years, higher diastolic blood pressure, a narrower facial skeleton, and greater magnitude ofcooling of the temperature of the fingertips to cognitive challenge. Finally, variation inmagnitude of interference to fearful or aggressive pictures on a modified Stroop procedure failedto differentiate anxious from nonanxious or high from low reactive children.