Les facteurs explicatifs de la sensibilité à l’anxiété chez l’enfant: revue de la litterature

Anxiety 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.