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Definition
A longitudinal study was conducted over 17 years on the island of Dominica that investigated the effects family environment had on a child’s stress level. It identified a number of factors such as family composition and instability within the home as key sources of stress to children.
Introduction
Humans have evolved mechanisms that function to increase fitness within their environments. The stress response is one of those mechanisms that increases the likelihood of surviving a threat in the environment (Flinn et al. 2005). While acute stress is adaptive, chronic stress can negatively affect many aspects of health, and in the modern environment chronic stress can be caused by a variety of sources (Ader et al. 1995; Munck and Guyre 1991). Given how dependent human children are on their caretakers, they may be specifically sensitive to interactions within the family environment (Geary and Flinn 2001), and a stressful family...
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References
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Wysocki, A. (2016). Kinship and Cortisol in Caribbean Village (Flinn et al., 2005). In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1154-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1154-1
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