Developmental antecedents of anxiety sensitivity

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) has been implicated in the etiology of anxiety and depressive disorders. Nonetheless, little is known about the developmental antecedents of AS or about its role as a mediator of emotional distress. To investigate these issues, 249 university students completed a battery of self-report measures. Regression analyses and partial correlations were used to evaluate hypotheses. Analyses revealed that exposure to parental threatening, hostile, and rejecting behaviors (1) predicted overall AS and (2) appeared differentially related to AS factors. Additionally, AS acted as a mediator between parenting and both current emotional distress and history of emotional disorder symptoms. These data support the notion that parental behaviors hypothesized as etiologic in the development of emotional disorders may also be etiologic in the development of AS and that AS may serve as a mediator between childhood experience and emotional distress.