• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.45 no.9
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• pp.53-62
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• 2007

The purposes of this study were to look at the patterns of Korean preschoolers' cortisol levels at home and to examine the relations of cortisol pattern to the preschooler's internalizing behavioral tendency with focused on behavioral inhibition and internalizing problematic behavior. The subjects of the study were forty 4-year old preschoolers(27 boys and 13 girls). Saliva was collected at home during the weekends, and cortisol was analyzed by Radioimmunoassay procedure. "Strange Peer Situation Experiment" developed by Rubin, Coplan, Fox and Calkins(1995) and revised by Rubin, Burgess and Hastings(2002) was used to measure the preschooler's behavior inhibition. Problematic behavior was measured through a "Korean Children's Behavior Checklist" (Oh, K. J., Lee, H. R., Hong, K. E., & Ha, E. H., 1997). The results were as follows: First, on average for a 4-year old, the level of cortisol was 0.22 in the morning, and 0.14 in the afternoon. There was a pattern that cortisol levels had declined in the afternoon. There was no difference in cortisol levels between genders. Secondly, there was a tendency that children of higher inhibition level at the lab showed the higher cortisol levels in the morning. However, this difference was not statistically significant. Thirdly, the higher the cortisol levels at home, the more showed internalizing behavior. Externalizing behavior was not correlated with the cortisol levels. It was concluded that cortisol may be related to children's internalizing behavior tendency.

• Korean Journal of Childcare and Education
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.153-171
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• 2015

The purposes of this study were to explore the relations of preschoolers' narrative representation profile types to diurnal cortisol regulation pattern at home. Fourteen story stems from the MacArthur Story Stem Battery (MSSB, Bretherton, et al., 1990) were administered to 40 preschoolers(22 boys, 18 girls, aged 5) recruited from 8 kindergartens in the Seoul and Gyeonggi areas. And also, their saliva cortisol was collected. The children's responses were aggregated into 5 dimensions, based on content themes and performance scores, which included emotions expressed and narrative coherence using the MacArthur Narrative Coding System(Robinson, et al., 2004). Data were analyzed by means of cluster analysis. Five response profiles emerged over the course of this research: Prosocial, Anxiety, Dyregulated aggression, Restricted, and Avoidance profiles. Cortisol at home showed decrease diurnal cortisol regulation patterns, however it showed a difference according to narrative response profiles. Restricted, Prosocial, and Avoidance profiles showed decrease diurnal cortisol regulation patterns. Anxiety profiles showed flat pattern, and Dyregulated aggression profile showed rising diurnal cortisol regulation pattern. These results show the preschoolers' internal representation may affect the diurnal cortisol reaction in daytime.