Does Verbal Conflict in Childhood Mean Less Stress in Adulthood?

The connection between stress and depression has been understood for a long time. Follow that logic a step further and something useful falls out: people who can adjust to and manage stressful moments are less likely to tip into a full depressive episode. A study in Human Communication Research, carried out by researchers at Rollins College and The Pennsylvania State University, lands on a related and slightly uncomfortable finding. Children who grew up around intense verbal aggression tended to handle intense conflict better once they reached adulthood.

That is not an argument for exposing kids or teenagers to verbal abuse, and nobody involved is suggesting we manufacture those encounters. What the data points to is quieter than that. Some of these children appear to reach adulthood already wired to absorb heated arguments and tense interpersonal moments that would leave others reeling.

Lindsey Aloia of Rollins College and Denise Solomon of The Pennsylvania State University recruited 100 college students who were in romantic relationships, 50 couples in total, to track how early exposure to verbal aggression surfaced in stressful adult situations. Each participant sat for an individual interview and completed questionnaires. The goal of that first round was to pin down which topics caused the most friction inside each relationship, and to record how much verbal aggression the person had been exposed to as a child.

Once the sore subjects were identified, the couples were seated together and told to talk through one area of conflict for ten minutes. The conversation was recorded. Trained judges later watched those recordings and rated how intense the conflict communication was for each pair.

To get an objective read on stress rather than relying on self-report, the team collected saliva samples to measure cortisol, the hormone most associated with stress. They took a baseline sample before the discussion and two more over the twenty minutes that followed. Comparing cortisol across those three points let them chart how much each person's stress actually climbed as a result of the argument.

The pattern was clear in one direction: the more intense the judges rated a couple's exchange, the sharper the physiological stress response. But participants who reported heavier exposure to verbal aggression in childhood showed a weaker response to the same kind of conflict. One reading of this is that early exposure to stressful situations builds some capacity to cope with stress later, possibly because those children were pushed to develop coping strategies that other kids never needed.

None of this cancels out a large body of research pointing the other way. Conflict is tied to plenty of damage: depression, anxiety, anger, dissatisfaction inside relationships, and in some cases physical violence. The toll of verbal stress on children specifically is well documented. Stress ramps up agitation and, carried far enough, it can wear down a child's health. Arguments that are long or frequent can condition a child toward a steady background hum of anxiety, depression, and frustration.

So repeated arguments aimed at children should never be encouraged or excused, however hopeful this new research sounds. The study did not map the participants' psychological states or how prone they were to arguing in the first place. The fact that they tolerated conflict more easily, and felt less stressed than their peers, says nothing about whatever private struggles sat outside what the researchers measured.

The likelier explanation for the lower stress readings is adaptation: these people had learned, somewhere along the way, coping mechanisms that worked when a situation got tense. The verbal aggression itself can do real harm. It can also, almost as a side effect, prod a person into experimenting with ways to handle conflict emotionally until they find something that holds.

Reframe interpersonal conflict as a genuine stressor with measurable physical fallout, and the research starts to show how facing conflict as an adolescent can shape how well someone later rides out that stressor. "Conflict experiences can be beneficial, by alleviating tension and avoiding conflict escalation, reducing communication apprehension, and contributing to closeness within the relationship," Aloia said. "Given the diversity of outcomes associated with interpersonal conflict, efforts to understand variation in the experienced negativity of conflict experiences are extremely important in helping people navigate these interactions."

The takeaway is narrow and specific: childhood experience of intense verbal conflict may be connected to a higher tolerance for the stress that verbal conflict produces later in life.

- Laura A. Wells. Source: International Communication Association. (2014, November 24). Experience with family verbal conflict as a child can help in stressful situations as an adult. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 1, 2014.