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Updated: Oct 8, 2025

Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
Psychophysiological adjustment to formal education varies as a function of peer status and socioeconomic status in
Leah Wright1, Luz Stella Lopez2, Gina Camargo2
1Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Abstract:
The transition to kindergarten can be stressful as children adjust to novel separations from their caregivers and become accustomed to their peer group. A 9-month study of 96 children (Mage = 5.37 years, SD = 0.42) from Barranquilla, Colombia, assessed socioeconomic differences in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning across the kindergarten year. Children were from four different classrooms in one school. Saliva samples were collected twice a day across 3 consecutive days at the beginning and end of the school year. We examined whether change in HPA axis activation across the year varied as a function of a child's socioeconomic status (SES) and experience in the peer group. We found that rejected children and lower SES children had lower cortisol levels early in the morning. Rejected children had a flatter morning cortisol slope. Lower SES children had higher cortisol than their higher SES peers at the end of the school year and a flatter morning cortisol slope. Taken together, these findings suggest that diurnal cortisol in children beginning kindergarten may be influenced by both peer rejection and SES.
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