The Emotion Development Lab

There has been a call for evidence-based interventions (EBI: including prevention and treatment) for minority youth because most current EBIs are not culturally sensitive and their efficacy is variable. While progress has been made for African American youth in certain domains (e.g., depression; Breland-Noble et al., 2010), there is still a paucity of EBI for young children and additional barriers to progress exist for young children (Cuthbert, 2010; Hall, 2001). In the area of anxiety research, there is a critical need to understand the processes underlying the development of anxiety-related problems in young children, particularly at their onset in preschool. This community-based participatory research (CBPR) study addressed gaps in our understanding of factors associated with childhood anxiety in a low-income, urban African American preschool population by examining the manner in which multiple risk and protective factors are associated with anxiety. Specific aims included: (1) exploring the manner in which protective and risk factors are linked to the expression of anxiety symptoms among high-risk African American preschoolers, with a particular focus on the factors that contribute to resilience in these children; (2) examined whether maternal overprotection mediates the association between fearful temperament and anxious symptoms in a high-fear selected subsample of these preschoolers; and (3) established the feasibility and provide an initial assessment of a preventive-intervention program.