Poster #5 - Transactional Associations Between Children’s Attentional Fluctuations and Maternal Emotional Support in Early Childhood

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Attentional control fluctuates between being on and off a given task, even in the absence of salient distractors (Unsworth, et al., 2015). Greater fluctuations in attentional control are associated with lower performance in tasks of working memory, cognitive flexibility, and academic skills (Kane et al., 2016; Isbell et al., 2018). Thus, delineating the pathways to consistent control of attention as children transition to school can have implications for promoting cognitive and educational outcomes. Supportive parenting behaviors, such as positive expressivity and encouragement of independent actions, may provide optimal arousal levels and greater opportunities for children to benefit from parental scaffolding of attentional skills. In contrast, mothers’ non-supportive behaviors, such as hostile expressivity and infrequent engagement, may produce either affective overarousal or lower levels of interest and arousal in children. Both hyperarousal and hypoarousal can lead to frequent fluctuations in attentional control (Unsworth & Robinson, 2017). In turn, interacting with a child who experience frequent lapses in attention may increase maternal frustration and disengagement, which may lead to progressively less effective maternal responses. Here we examined the transactional associations between attentional fluctuations and maternal emotional support across preschool, kindergarten, and first grade.

Participants were part of a longitudinal study on early academic performance (N = 261; 55% female, 61% non-Hispanic White, age at preschool: M = 56 months, SD = 4.70). A response time variability measure was used to assess attentional fluctuations during a Go-No/Go task (Lahat et al., 2010). Maternal emotional support was observed during a mother-child problem-solving task and rated for indicators of emotional responsiveness, intrusiveness, and negativity (Leerkes et al., 2011). The longitudinal associations between attentional fluctuations and maternal emotional support were assessed via a cross-lagged panel model, which included child's age at the first time point, gender, minority status, and income-to-needs ratio as covariates.

The resultant model fit reasonably well, χ2(8) = 21.91, p = .01, CFI = .97, RMSEA = .08. Standardized parameter values for the paths between attentional fluctuations and maternal support are shown in Figure 1. Both attentional fluctuations and maternal support predicted themselves at the next time point. Of the cross-lagged paths, higher levels of attentional fluctuations in preschool were associated with lower maternal emotional support at kindergarten, which in turn was associated with higher levels of attentional fluctuations in first grade.

Our findings highlight the transactional processes between the development of consistency of attentional control and maternal emotional support as children transition to formal schooling. Parents may have increasing expectations about how consistently children should be able to focus their attention as they get ready to attend kindergarten. Children who experience frequent lapses of attention during this period may increase parental disappointment, frustration and disengagement, which may lead to higher levels of unresponsiveness, intrusiveness, and hostility. In turn, children who experience unsupportive parenting behaviors may have increasingly dysregulated arousal levels and difficulty facing the new attentional demands of the formal schooling environment, which may amplify fluctuations in attention control during early years of elementary school.

Authors

• Elif Isbell, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Selin Zeytinoglu, University of Maryland, College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Esther Leerkes, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Calkins, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author