Cortisol reactivity and regulation associated with shame responding in early childhood.

The purpose of this study was to characterize cortisol response and regulation associated with shame responding in early childhood and to examine how general the relation between shame and cortisol is. It was predicted that children responding to task failure with shame would show a larger and more prolonged cortisol response than other children. Participants were 214 children (124 boys, 90 girls) ranging from 3.7 to 4.5 years of age (M = 4.14 years, SD = 0.24). Shame responding was assessed from children's emotion-expressive behavior in response to failing 6 performance tasks, 2 preceding (initial) and 4 following (subsequent) assessment of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activation. Cortisol response and regulation associated with failure were assessed from saliva sampled before and 15, 20, 25, 30, and 40 min following the first of the 2 initial failures. For boys and for some girls, high initial shame was associated with greater cortisol reactivity and slower regulation of the cortisol response. For boys, high initial shame and relatively slow regulation of the associated cortisol response predicted subsequent shame responding occurring after recovery of the cortisol response. For girls, high initial shame, but not cortisol response, predicted subsequent shame responding.