Feb 10 2010
Sensitivity to Stress as a Good Thing
According to a simplistic view of human psychology, stress is bad, and high sensitivity to stress is really bad. But with a more educated, scientific outlook we need to ask more questions. What kind of stress? How much stress? How often? For whom?
Thanks to new research, we now know to add this question: In what type of social setting and structure?
Here’s the lead paragraph to the news release:
Children who are especially reactive to stress are more vulnerable to adversity and have more behavior and health problems than their peers. But a new longitudinal study suggests that highly reactive children are also more likely to do well when they’re raised in supportive environments.
Before sharing the results, I must say that I’m unsure of the strength of the actual science behind the conclusions. This is all I learned about it from the article:
The researchers looked at 338 kindergarteners, as well as their teachers and families, to determine how family adversity and biological reactivity contribute to healthy development.
While 338 is an adequate sample size, what the heck does “looked at” mean?
So, with the results consequently taken with a grain of salt, we find that they were this:
[H]ighly reactive children were more likely to have developmental problems . . .
But wait, that’s not the whole story. The second half to the sentence answers an additional important question:
. . . when growing up in adverse, stressful family settings.
Ah, nice. So for the what we have a when. And there’s more! We can now add a big if to the equation.
But contrary to expectation, such children were also more likely to thrive when they were raised in caring, low-stress families because of their sensitivities to the supportive and nurturing qualities of such environments.
This finding brings to mind ADHD children. Somewhat similarly, one could simplistically ask, Is having ADHD a bad thing? Before answering that question in an educated, scientific manner, we’d have to refine it by asking a number of other questions.
As an offhand tangent, this question comes to mind: Asking people if they’d want a person with ADHD on their “team.” The smart person would ask questions about both the person with ADHD and the team. Who else was on the team? And, importantly, what were the team’s goals and preferred methods of operating?
Science. So many questions. So many questions about those questions. I wonder, are those who are good at asking questions better at answering them?
