Boyce – sensitivity to context

Well what we have discovered in the course of doing laboratory studies of children’s responses to stress, biological responses to stress in the lab is that there’s a sub group of kids that have quite exaggerated heightened responses in one or both of the major stress response systems that are in the brain and in the periphery. And the interesting thing to us is that those, that sub set of children that we think of as highly reactive to the challenges that we present to them, when we take those kids and observe them in naturalistic epidemiologic studies where we’re actually looking at incidence of illness or behavioural disorders and so on over time, the kids who have this feature of being biologically reactive in the lab, in all of our studies have had either the best outcomes or the worst outcomes, nothing in between. And it depends on the character of the natural social environments in which they are being reared, which of those they display. 

So kids who are coming from homes where there is a lot of conflict or violence, where there is some form of child maltreatment, the kids who are highly reactive in the lab have the worst outcomes in those circumstances. Worse even than their peers who have similar social circumstances but don’t have the reactivity characteristic that we see in the lab. 

The interesting thing though is that the same kind of reactive child, in a very positive environment, had the very best outcomes of any of the children that we study. So it’s as if they’re kind of more permeable, or open to the effects of the environmental circumstances.