Do adolescents respond differently to stress than children?

Details

Little is known about normal variation in stress responses across the transition to adolescence. This study examined neuroendocrine and cardiovascular responses to performance and peer rejection stressors over that transition in a normative sample.

Researchers recruited 82 healthy participants through community postings: 39 children aged 7–12, including 22 females, and 43 adolescents aged 13–17, including 20 females. After a habituation session, participants completed either a performance stress session involving public speaking, mental arithmetic and mirror tracing, or a peer rejection stress session involving exclusion challenges. Salivary cortisol, salivary alpha amylase (sAA), systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP and DBP), and heart rate were measured throughout.

Adolescents showed significantly greater cortisol, sAA, SBP and DBP stress responses than children. The developmental differences were most pronounced during the performance session for cortisol and DBP, and during the peer rejection session for sAA and SBP.

The authors suggest that heightened physiological stress responses in typical adolescents may help them adapt to new challenges in adolescence and adulthood. In high-risk adolescents, they suggest that this normative shift may tip the balance toward stress response dysregulation associated with depression and other psychopathology. They conclude that the specificity of physiological responses by stressor type highlights the importance of a multisystem approach to the psychobiology of stress and may also have implications for understanding trajectories to psychopathology.