# Mapping Dimensional Aspects of Biobehavioral Threat Reactivity in Young, Violence-Exposed Children: Linkages to Fear and Distress

> **NIH NIH U01** · UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT SCH OF MED/DNT · 2021 · $745,263

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY:
Interpersonal violence (IV) affects more than 1 in 5 young children in the United States annually. For young
children, IV exposure most commonly occurs within the family context in the forms of partner violence and
harsh/abusive parenting. Children exposed to IV represent a heterogeneous group. A portion of children
develop psychological problems that cut across multiple diagnostic categories characterized by fear and
distress symptoms. Existing models broadly implicate disruptions in biological stress systems in the etiology of
violence-associated symptoms, but lack specificity for explaining heterogeneous symptom presentations in
young children. Advancing this science requires novel laboratory and analytic methods for assessing and
synthesizing threat reactivity across multiple biobehavioral levels. Inspired by the Research Domain Criteria
(RDoC) initiative, we propose to achieve this by leveraging person-centered methods to identify unique profiles
of threat reactivity across multiple levels of biobehavioral functioning never before studied together in young
children: observed behavior, attention bias, autonomic reactivity, startle, event-related brain potentials. The
fundamental scientific premise of the proposed work is that threat reactivity is a central intermediate
phenotype linking early IV to this clinical vulnerability in young children. The proposed sample will
include 360 children, ages 4 to 6 years, with (n = 240) and without (n = 120) IV exposure followed over 1 year.
We advance three aims. Aim 1 is to map biobehavioral threat reactivity profiles to dimensional patterns
of fear and distress in IV exposed and non-exposed young children. We hypothesize that we will identify
hyper- and hypo-reactive profiles that link to greater symptoms relative to a non-extreme profile, and that
hyper-reactivity will relate to fear, whereas hypo-reactivity will relate to distress at baseline and over 1 year.
Aim 2 is to test whether threat reactivity profiles serve as intermediate phenotypes in explaining the
link between violence exposure and symptoms over time. We hypothesize that children exposed to more
severe IV will more likely be classified as hyper- or hypo-reactive and that profile type will mediate the link
between IV and symptoms at baseline and 1 year later. Further, given high dependency of young children’s
self-regulation on caregiving relationships and threats to regulatory capacity in violent environments, we
hypothesize that mothers’ ability to co-regulate their children’s negative affect will shape these risk pathways.
Thus, Aim 3 is to test the hypothesis that maternal responsiveness to child negative affect will play a
unique role in shaping threat reactivity pathways over time. We hypothesize that emotionally-responsive
parenting (assessed with a multi-method protocol) will buffer the associations between IV and threat reactivity
profiles and between exposure and symptom trajectories over 1 year. This study will...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10248455
- **Project number:** 5U01MH113390-04
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT SCH OF MED/DNT
- **Principal Investigator:** Margaret J Briggs-Gowan
- **Activity code:** U01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $745,263
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-09-01 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10248455

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10248455, Mapping Dimensional Aspects of Biobehavioral Threat Reactivity in Young, Violence-Exposed Children: Linkages to Fear and Distress (5U01MH113390-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10248455. Licensed CC0.

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