Gunnar – relationships buffer stress

So, I spent a good part of my early career trying to understand what regulates stress in very young children who were too young to regulate stress by controlling and predicting and all of those things. And the biggest thing was relationships. So what regulated, incredibly powerful stress regulators, to be in a secure attachment relationship with a person who is present. Not just to be in a secure attachment relationship and that person isn’t present, but to have that person present and you trust, and we’re still trying to figure out but I think it actually influences a region call the orbital frontal cortex, and it probably actually short circuits the signals to stress biology. 

So what, for example, we studied babies when they were going to their Well Baby checkup—I use doctors a lot to stress babies because they could do things to make the baby healthy that were way more stressful than I could do—and we were interested in the physical exam and the shots that babies get. Two big shots. One in each thigh. Two months, four months, six months, and sometime in the second year. And we followed babies over those shots, and boy, at two months they’re little bodies were going off like crazy, but that was probably okay because they don’t have all those receptors yet for stress biology. 

And then it began to shut down and by 12 months, they didn’t elevate at all. Now, they cried like heck. They hated having shots. Their heart rates went up. But their cortisol didn’t budge. Unless they were in an insecure attachment relationship with their parent, in which case it activated, not horribly, but it was as if the presence of that secure relationship was serving as a buffer. And the less secure relationships were sort of leaky buffers. We of course know that if you take that buffer away, if you send a child to child care, and they’re alone, they’ve lost their buffer and they haven’t yet made the relationship with the person in the day care centre, it’s going to take weeks of every day that baby’s going to elevate, a lot. But after a time, after about two, three weeks, they only elevate a little bit.