Study Identifies Risk Factors For High Anxiety In Young Adults During COVID-19 Pandemic

Press release

Friday 12 February 2021

Findings on the impact of childhood temperament could help anxiety prevention efforts.

A new study identified early risk factors that predicted increased anxiety in young adults during the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). The results of the study, supported by the National Institutes of Health and published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, could help predict who is most at risk for developing anxiety during stressful events in early adulthood and inform prevention and intervention efforts.

Investigators looked at data from 291 participants who had been followed from infancy to young adulthood as part of a larger study of temperament and socio-emotional development. The researchers found that participants who continued to show a temperamental characteristic called behavioral inhibition in childhood were more likely to experience anxiety disorder in adolescence (15 years), which in turn predicted anxiety. high during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic when participants were young adults (around 18 years old).

“People differ greatly in the way they deal with stress,” said Daniel Pine, MD, study author and head of the Developmental and Affective Neuroscience section of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). . “This study shows that children’s level of fear predicts the level of stress they experience later in life when facing difficult circumstances, such as the pandemic.

Behavioral inhibition is an infantile temperament characterized by high levels of cautious, fearful and avoidant responses to unfamiliar people, objects, and situations. Previous studies have established that children who exhibit behavioral inhibition are at increased risk of developing anxiety disorders later. However, less research has investigated the specific mechanisms by which a stable pattern of behavioral inhibition in childhood is linked to anxiety in young adults.

The authors of this study hypothesized that children who demonstrate a stable pattern of behavioral inhibition may be at higher risk for anxiety deregulation in adolescence – that is, difficulty coping with worry and displaying inappropriate expressions of worry – and that would put them at greater risk later on. increased anxiety during stressful events such as the pandemic.

In the largest study, behavioral inhibition was measured at ages 2 and 3 using observations of children’s responses to new toys and interactions with unknown adults. When the children were 7 years old, they were observed for social mistrust during an unstructured free play task with an unknown peer. Anxiety deregulation was assessed at age 15 through a self-report survey. For the present study, participants, averaging 18 years old, were assessed for anxiety twice in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic after issuance of stay-at-home orders (d ‘first between April 20 and May 15 and about a month later).

At the first assessment, 20% of participants reported moderate levels of anxiety symptoms considered to be within the clinical range. At the second assessment, 18.3% of participants reported clinical levels of anxiety. As expected, the researchers found that people with strong behavioral inhibition in toddlers who continued to display high levels of social mistrust in childhood reported experiencing deregulated worry during adolescence, which ultimately resulted in predicts increased anxiety in young adults during a critical stage of the pandemic. This developmental path was not significant for children who showed behavioral inhibition in early childhood, but who displayed low levels of social mistrust later in childhood.

“This study provides further evidence of the continued impact of early temperament on the mental health of individuals,” said Nathan A. Fox, Ph.D., professor emeritus and director of the Child Development Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park and study author. “Young children with stable behavioral inhibition are at increased risk for greater worry and anxiety, and the context of the pandemic has only worsened these effects.”

The results suggest that targeting social distrust in childhood and deregulation of anxiety in adolescence may be a viable strategy for the prevention of anxiety disorders. The results also suggest that targeting deregulated worry in adolescence may be particularly important for identifying those who might be at risk for developing increased anxiety during stressful life events like the COVID-19 pandemic and for preventing this increased anxiety.

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About the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): The mission of NIMH is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illness through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery and cure. For more information, visit the NIMH website.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, comprises 27 institutes and centers and is a component of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The NIH is the primary federal agency that conducts and supports basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and studies the causes, treatments, and cures for common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

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