Psychobiological Differences in Childhood Stress Response. I. Patterns of Illness and Susceptibility

Review of the literature demonstrates that an association between psychosocial stress and illness has consistently been demonstrated in child as well as adult populations. Consideration of the physiology of the stress response lends biological plausibility to the negative effects of stress on health. Associations between stress and illness are only modest, however, and the stress-illness hypothesis does not adequately account for the uneven distribution of morbidity in childhood. Attention to individual differences in children's behavioral, emotional, and biological responsiveness to the environment may provide a more useful perspective for understanding the effects of stress on childhood health. From this vantage point, stressful events are seen as the interactive product of environmental and organismic processes.