Community Violence Exposure and Coping: Preliminary Associations with Internalizing Symptoms and Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenocortical Axis Reactivity

Given deleterious impacts of community violence exposure (CVE), we examined whether CVE predicted internalizing symptoms and cortisol reactivity, as well as how coping moderates these relationships. We found that higher reports of both CVE and emotional coping were significantly related to internalizing and emotional coping predicted a lower cortisol response.