The question that screams in my mind is how much impact parental behavior had on the learned responses of the children.
This is also my primary incite to reading that entire news story... which cited:
A key study in this emerging field, published in 2004, showed that the quality of a rat mother's care significantly affects how its offspring behave in adulthood.
Well no shit... there are plenty of studies that already exist that empirically prove that neglecting a child in early childhood affects that child in teen and adulthood... it called emotional abuse.
Not really sure what exactly it has to do with them trying to pair the lower cortisol levels from parent to new born though. Clear evidence already exists that our bodies can and do change constantly, which means, whilst a parent may have passed a lower cortisol level to their newborn, that level can change if the child is raised in a healthy manner and the child is well cared and loved, hence other studies mentioned in that same article.
I think its extremely idiotic to use 9/11 as an excuse. They got it right in the first instance, being psychologists thought they would have this flood of business after 9/11, yet it didn't exist, because empirical data already exists on how robust the human brain is to overcome from trauma, hence the current trendy term, plasticity.
Therapy models where changed from 9/11 because they found it was far better to not intervene with therapy and instead put all the effected persons in a room together and let them talk amongst themselves, cry, grieve, etc, with others who understood their pain directly... the results changed therapeutic training to what we know now, being a majority of people will suffer symptoms after trauma, being normal, yet will also recover 100% within six months without any intervention. Its only a minority that after this time don't recover, or have snowballed trauma within their pasts, where one traumatic event is the straw the broke the camels back, so to speak.
