Why do we study anxiety as a multi-faceted construct? Does it matter to our phenomenology, how we experience this emotion, and how we behave? This begs the question: What matters most in the study of emotion? As we discussed in this blog over the last year, understanding the development of anxiety is complex and not as straightforward as we would think or hope. Even with our most robust predictors like fearful temperament, not all fearful children become anxious and not all individuals who are anxious were temperamentally fearful as children. It may seem more obvious why researchers are interested in the environment (such as parenting) relative to why we would care about physiological processes. However, we argue that these biological components are just as important to understand, and we are only beginning to identify the role they play in socio-emotional development.

I have spent the better part of my career trying to understand the role of physiological processes in the development of emotions and anxiety. It was a question that was initially inspired by the foundational work of Dr. Megan Gunnar where we leveraged measurement of the hormone cortisol to understand the role of this stress marker on behavior and adjustment in infants and children. It can be tempting to hypothesize that there was a direct link between the physiological response and the behaviors we observe particularly in infancy (for example, pain equals crying). Although this is not this straightforward, we know from decades of work that physiological processes matter in understanding behavioral development.

Even though the biological systems that we study do not exist solely to support our emotions and psychology, predictable associations exist between the behaviors we study (fear and anxiety) and various........

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