This time of year, all of us become more
aware of stress and anxiety. We perceive that there's more to accomplish with
less money, perhaps less time and certainly less daylight.
A recent article in the
New York Times
Magazine (October 4, 2009) centered on the subject of anxiety captured my
interest. The article focused on Dr. Jerome Kagan's longitudinal study on the
effects of basic temperament.
Kagan, perhaps one of the best known developmental
psychologists, began studying babies many years ago in terms of whether they
were easily upset when exposed to new situations. One such "high reactive" baby
was distressed by new sounds, new voices, new toys, and new smells, and
expressed her upset by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Kagan
interviewed her again when she was 15 and she had grown up true to her
temperament. She fidgeted with her hair and jiggled her foot and otherwise
demonstrated basic anxiety. When asked what she worries about, she confided a
long list of stresses.
Kagan's study has found that people
"wired" to worry from early infancy express their worry in different ways later
in life, taking the form of excessive vigilance, vomiting before exams, or
overall general tension.
An interesting study conducted by Nathan
Fox of the University of Maryland, followed 180 children from the age of 4
months and tested them when they were between 13 and 15. One test measured
vigilance by pairing two faces briefly on a computer screen, one face appearing
threatening while the same face on the other side appearing pleasant. Highly
reactive children reacted like adults with clinical anxiety, consistently
reacting faster to the threatening faces.
A similar study designed to measure the
startle response involved telling teenagers seated in front of a screen that
when the screen was blue there was a chance they might experience a puff of air
blasted at their throats (uncomfortable but not painful), while when the screen
is green, they are safe. The experimenter also played a loud noise and measures
the startle response of an involuntary eye blink. All the subjects had a strong
startle when the blue screen is on, but anxiety prone kids also startled just as
much with the green screen, staying on guard even when the situation was not
threatening.
Anxious temperament is also revealed in
the results of functional and structural MRI studies. Carl Schwartz, conducted
MRI studies with Dr. Kagan's research subjects in 2004. His results showed that
those who were high-reactors as infants tended to have significant thickening
of the prefrontal cortex. Since one task of the prefrontal cortex is to put the
damper on signals that arise from social anxiety, one explanation of this
finding is that a thicker cortex may protect high reactors from these anxiety
signals. One of the most fearful children in Kagan's long-term study who also
demonstrated the most anxiety-related psychological problems, however, showed a
significantly thinner prefrontal cortex. Although results cannot be generalized
on the basis of a very few subjects, the researcher postulated that her thin
cortex may have been unable to regulate the high activity of her amygdala.
Another study conducted by Daniel Pine of
NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) examined further some of Kagan's
high reactive babies at adolescence. These research subjects were shown fearful
faces and asked alternatively to focus on their fearful feelings about the
faces or to focus on a neutral part of the face, such as the nose. Those in the
low-risk group for anxiety showed no difference in the activation of their
amygdala when asked to notice their feelings about the fearful faces, while the
high-reactors demonstrated significant increases in amygdala activation.
You may be relieved to know that Dr. Kagan
has suggested that anxious temperament in the modern world may actually offer
some benefits such as caution, introspection, and the ability to work alone.
Anxious individuals also tend to be conscientious and almost obsessively
well-prepared. The hope is that those of us with anxious temperaments can
evolve creative ways of coping with our worries such as making sure we are
well-prepared, giving ourselves more than enough time to complete tasks, and
avoiding situations that we know are activating for us.
But due to the nature of intriguing but
inexact behavioral sciences research, we can really only point to trends and
achieve better understanding of specific individuals. After all, as the article
points out, temperament is important but life always intervenes.
The newer sciences related to
neuroplasticity offer us compelling
hope that we can create experiences that will change our DNA footprints through
the brain so that we can transform the rigid, anxious brain into a more
flexible, creative one. We will be exploring this exciting frontier in
newsletters to come.
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