The explanatory factors of anxiety sensitivity at the child: literature review

peer reviewedAnxiety sensitivity (AS) is the fear of anxiety-related sensations, arising from beliefs that the sensations have harmful physical, psychological or social consequences. AS is considered as a risk factor for the development and preservation of anxiety disorders. It is thus important to understand the development of AS to have a preventive act of anxiety disorders. This article is a synthesis of studies that have investigated the etiology of child AS, to extract explanatory models. Some factors are playing a role in the development of AS: biologic, interpersonal and environmental factors. Results indicated that studies have investigated those factors alone, and those factors accounted a part of incremental variance in child AS. To improve the understanding of development of AS, a integrate model with some factors – sex of children, sex of parents, sources of learning, emotional and relational state of parents- may be investigate in future studies