The Fast Track intervention was designed in part to help children develop capacities for emotion regulation and self-control, specifically in the context of social stress. And there is evidence Fast Track was successful in this respect. For example, children who received the Fast Track intervention showed improved capacity to accurately appraise benign social stimuli, whereas control children were more likely to appraise these stimuli as threatening (Dodge, Godwin, & CPPRG, 2013). We hypothesized that children who were more biologically sensitive to stress would show the worst outcomes in the control arm of the trial and the best outcomes in the intervention arm of the trial. To identify such children, we turned to a gene encoding a key mediator of the social-stress response, the glucocorticoid receptor NR3C1.
