Caregiver Handholding Decreases Social Threat Bias in Preschoolers

• In Event: 3-014 - The Influence of Parent-Child Interaction on Child Development: a Multi-Modal Social Neuroscience Approach

Integrative Statement

Caring touch can serve as a cue indicating the availability of social support. For instance, touch via handholding has been shown to attenuate threat responding in married couples (Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006). Sensitivity to pleasant touch is seen early in ontogeny (e.g., Fairhurst, Löken, & Grossmann, 2014), but how touch affects threat responding early in development is unknown. We tested whether mere caregiver presence or touch via caregiver handholding were better at reducing children’s social threat responding. In three experiments, children (N = 105) were presented with a 3x3 matrix of photos of adults displaying emotional facial expressions on a touch screen and asked to detect a target expression (angry or happy) among distractor expressions (neutral) in two 24-trial blocks. Threat bias scores were calculated as the speed at detecting happy targets minus the speed at detecting angry targets, with higher scores indicating a bias to detect threat more quickly. Parents were also given a questionnaire measuring child-caregiver relationship quality.
In Experiment 1, 5-year-old children completed the task either while sitting next to their primary caregiver (mere caregiver presence; n = 20) or without their caregiver (n = 20). Confirming previous work (LoBue, 2009), our analysis revealed a main effect of emotion, F(1, 37) = 62.83, p < .0005, whereby children were faster at detecting angry faces (M = 3.00, SE = .10) than happy faces (M = 3.78, SE = .15). There were no effects of caregiver context (mere presence versus absence) or relationship quality, suggesting that mere caregiver presence did not reduce threat responding.
In Experiment 2, we instead used a within-subjects design, asking each 5-year-old child (n = 20) to perform the task in both contexts (mere caregiver presence and absence). Again, we found a main effect of emotion, F(1, 18) = 24.92, p < .0005, where children detected angry faces faster than happy faces, but observed no effects of caregiver context or relationship quality.
In Experiment 3, we added touch via handholding as a cue of caregiver availability during the caregiver presence context. With 4 and 5-year-old children (n = 45) we again found a main effect of emotion, F(1, 43) = 83.25, p < .0005, with angry faces detected faster than happy faces. Crucially, there was an emotion by context by relationship quality interaction: during caregiver handholding, but not caregiver absence, children’s threat bias decreased as the quality of the relationship with their caregivers increased (caregiver handholding: r = -.354, p = .017; Figure 1). Splitting the sample into lower versus higher quality relationship groups at the median relationship score revealed that the higher quality group had a significantly reduced threat bias during caregiver handholding, but the lower quality group did not (Figure 2).
Children’s social threat bias was significantly reduced during caregiver handholding, which varied as a function of the child-caregiver relationship quality. In contrast, mere caregiver presence did not affect children’s threat bias, suggesting that caregiver touch is effective in attenuating threat vigilance in children with positive relationships with their caregivers.

Authors

• Cat Thrasher, University of Virginia
  Presenting Author

• Tobias Grossmann, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author