3-182 - Children's responses to social challenge: linking early dispositional traits to the development of social anxiety

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Although peer rejection and exclusion is common in the lives of most children, there are also marked individual differences that are associated with children’s interpretation of the social situation, their distress in response to the situation and their subsequent behavior. Specifically, dispositional characteristics, such as shyness, social reticence and behavioral inhibition may impact children’s responses to being rejected. Here, we take a developmental perspective and focus on understanding social rejection during the critical grade school years when core social skills develop. The first presentation uses behavioral and psychophysiological response data in a play-date task to demonstrate that shy children are more unhappy when rejected by peers than low-shy children, particularly boys. The second presentation draws on functional neuroimaging data to document that children who are socially reticent in early childhood show deficits in the engagement of a brain network implicated in emotion-regulation processing when they receive feedback from unpredictable peers. The third presentation suggests that behavioral inhibition may be associated with more sensitivity to being excluded, and hypothesizes that it may be associated with further withdrawal and place children at risk for developing social anxiety. Collectively, these studies represent an effort to understand the interaction between dispositional and contextual factors influencing the development of socially anxious behavior. Results show that children's attributions, feelings and behavior in response to exclusion varies as a function of early dispositional characteristics. Therefore, children's responses to challenging social situations may be a mechanism through which early dispositional factors are associated with the development of anxiety.

Sub Unit

• Social Relationships

Chair

• Kalina J. Michalska, National Institute of Mental Health

Discussant

• Kristin A Buss, Pennsylvania State University

Individual Presentations

• Temperament-linked individual differences and neural correlates of affective responses to peer evaluations in young children - Presenting Author: Nhi Thai, Pennsylvania State University; Amanda E Guyer, University of California, Davis; Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University

• Childhood Social Reticence Predicts Dysregulated Brain Function During Anticipated Social Evaluation in Adolescence - Presenting Author: Johanna M Jarcho, National Institutes of Health; Megam Davis, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Nathan A Fox, Univ of Maryland; Ellen Leibenluft, National Institute of Mental Health; Daniel S Pine, National Institute of Mental Health; Eric Nelson, NIMH, Natl Institutes of Health

• Responding to social exclusion: Influences of behavioral inhibition - Presenting Author: Kalina J. Michalska, National Institute of Mental Health; Olga L Walker, University of Maryland, College Park; Sonya Violet Troller-Renfree, University of Maryland, College Park; Nathan A Fox, Univ of Maryland