Trial reportDevelopment and psychopathology2020
Parenting matters: Parents can reduce or amplify children's anxiety and cortisol responses to acute stress.
Trial report in Development and psychopathology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Children's altruism following acute stress: The role of autonomic nervous system activity and social support.Developmental science · 2021Trial
- The effect of acute stress on executive function in children: Moderation by parasympathetic nervous system activity.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2026Article
- Impact of Mobile Oral Health Applications on Pediatric Dental Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis.Cureus · 2026Review
- Trajectories of perceived household chaos and youth health outcomes across the COVID-19: insights from individual, dyadic, and triadic family analyses.Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- "Look at me, not your screen": the negative association of parental phubbing on adolescent well-being.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Prefrontal cortex development and its implications in mental illness.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Post-weaning maternal presence exerts a protective effect against social isolation-induced behavioural alterations in mice.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Social buffering by siblings in childhood and adolescence.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2025Article
- Share-the-load vs bring-your-own-judge: The effects of friends on social evaluative stress in early adolescence.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2025Article
- Adolescents' Hormonal Responses to Social Stress and Associations with Adolescent Social Anxiety and Maternal Comfort: A Preliminary Study.Child psychiatry and human development · 2024Article
- The effects of parental presence on amygdala and mPFC activation during fear conditioning: An exploratory study.Developmental science · 2024Article
- A review of mental health disparities during COVID-19: Evidence, mechanisms, and policy recommendations for promoting societal resilience.Development and psychopathology · 2023Review
- Maternal mental health mediates links between socioeconomic status and child development.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Associations of air pollution with peripheral inflammation and cardiac autonomic physiology in children.New directions for child and adolescent development · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Parents serve important functions in regulating children's responses to stress and challenge. However, the parental characteristics that modulate the effectiveness of parents as stress buffers remain to be fully characterized. To address this gap, this study examined parental characteristics and behaviors that may explain variation in parents' ability to buffer cortisol responses to acute stress of 180 children (ages 9-11 years old, M = 9.9 years, SD = .58). Children were randomly assigned to either participate in a public speaking task, the Trier Social Stress Test - modified for children (TSST-M) or a control condition. Children in the TSST-M condition were randomly assigned to prepare for the public speaking task either with their parent (N = 59) or alone (N = 60), whereas 61 children were assigned to the control condition (no TSST-M). We found that parental education moderated the effect of condition on children's responses to acute stress. Children whose parents had lower levels of education exhibited reduced cortisol responses in the parent condition compared to the alone condition, showing a buffered pattern of reactivity. In contrast, children of parents with high levels of education displayed higher cortisol reactivity in the parent condition compared to the alone and control conditions. Parental education was also positively associated with higher levels of state anxiety within the parent condition. These results suggest that highly educated parents may emphasize performance over comfort, amplifying their children's state anxiety and cortisol responses to a public performance.
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