New meanings of 'thin-skinned'?

A bit on my ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship looking at stress, concentration and learning in children from low socio-economic status backgrounds.

There is a lot of research at the moment into household chaos - using the CHAOS questionnaire. It turns out that asking parents to self-rate on statements such as ‘it’s like a zoo sometimes in our house’ is a strong predictor both of their children’s school readiness (e.g. their ability to sit still and concentrate in class), and of the quality of the sibling interactions and so on. But of course, this is just a correlation, and any correlation can be mediated by any number of mediating factors. Which is why we want to look at this in more detail.

We are going to be measuring minute-by-minute changes in ‘chaos’ in the home environment by attaching monitors - Go-Pro cameras and microphones to children, to record how their environment changes over time. We predict, based on previous research, that children raised in low-socioeconomic status backgrounds will have noisier home environments - defined both as an increased density of low-level attention cues (i.e. a louder environment generally), and increased complexity (see e.g. here and here for formal approaches to defining complexity).

At the same time as we are recording children’s home environment we will also be recording their internal stress levels - by measuring heart rate, GSR, and movement. This allows us to address a number of questions. First, do children growing up in more noisy home environments tend to be more stressed generally? And second (which is basically another way of addressing the first question) - do sudden increases in outside stress (such as loud noises etc) associate with sudden increases in children’s internal stress levels? And we can also look at whether the predictability of their external environment associates with the predictability of childrens' internal stress levels (see here for more details, and see here, here, here and here for more on this).

But the really interesting question is whether some children are more sensitive to changes in their external environment than others. In other words, are some individuals more influenced by changes in the outside world than others are? To examine this we can measure whether minute-by-minute changes in the outside world associate with changes in internal stress levels, and whether these changes are stronger for some children than others. To do this, we'll use techniques such as cross-correlations.

Theoretically, this could be really interesting. Differential Susceptibility Theory predicts that ’neurobiologically sensitive’ children show a bivalent relationship between the environment and long-term outcomes. If a sensitive child is raised in a good environment, they show the best long-term outcomes - but if they are raised in a bad environment, they show the worst. (For ‘less sensitive’ children, in contrast, environment has less of a role to play in influencing outcomes.) But this research has mostly been developed using experimental techniques such as the still face procedure to measure how reactive different children are to stress - an approach that brings with it a variety of problems. And the new approaches that we're going to be using will hopefully give us a lot more insight into mechanisms and theory (e.g.).

If, that is, we can get the special 'home monitoring' equipment working OK! It's currently being built and programmed in Barnaul, in Russia. Fingers crossed that it works OK...