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Poster #212 - Naturalistic attention biases to social threat characterize socially withdrawn children

Fri, March 22, 9:45 to 11:00am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Behavioral Inhibition (BI) is an early-emerging fearful temperament, marked by increased sensitivity to unfamiliarity or novelty (Kagan et al., 1984). Children fitting the BI profile are also likely to exhibit higher levels of maladaptive behaviors such as social withdrawal (Pérez-Edgar et al., 2011). Moreover, both BI and social withdrawal are characterized by an attentional bias (AB) to threatening stimuli (Bar-Haim et al., 2007). While these threats can be social or non-social, children with BI often display more sensitivity to social threat cues (Morales et al., 2016).

In an ongoing sample enriched for BI (N-to-Date: 76, Mage=6.05yrs, 21 BI), children wore a mobile eye-tracker to complete episodes from the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery (Lab-TAB; Goldsmith et al., 1994). Included in this analysis are two episodes designed to elicit social fear. The first episode, Stranger Approach (SA), involves a male experimenter walking toward the child, sitting down, and initiating a conversation. The second episode, Stranger Working (SW), involves a child seated in a room with a Hungry Hungry Hippos toy without the needed marbles to play. A female stranger then enters the room with the marbles in hand and works for 2 minutes silently before leaving. We coded looking time toward the stranger for each episode. AB towards the stranger is indexed by the proportion of time spent looking at the stranger relative to the total duration of valid-looking time. Finally, social withdrawal was computed from the MacArthur Health and Behavior Questionnaire (HBQ; Essex et al., 2002).

To date, 17 participants’ mobile eye-tracking recordings have been coded across both episodes (Mage = 6.13yrs, SD = 0.75). In an exploratory analysis, we ran two linear regressions testing the relation between social withdrawal and AB towards the stranger in each episode. We found that social withdrawal positively predicted fixation proportion to the “social” male stranger at trend level, b = 35.20, p = .07. However, there was no significant relation between social withdrawal and fixation proportion to just the “non-social” female stranger, b = 19.42, p = .27. Looking behavior to the stranger in SW was not significantly correlated with the looking behavior to the stranger in SA b<0.001, p=.99 (Figure 2).

These results are consistent with prior research suggesting that children with social withdrawal/BI are characterized by having an AB to social threat. While the AB towards threat was shown within the SA episode, this is not seen in the SW episode. This may be because the SA episode involves a direct social confrontation while the SW episode allows the child to deflect from the interaction. These data suggest the feasibility of replicating more standardized paradigms assessing attention biases, which usually lack ecological validity, in more naturalistic settings. Moreover, this work helps to further characterize the profile of behaviors that may identify socially withdrawn children. Future directions include continued data collection, coding, and analysis to better understand the ways in which attentional biases to threat may operate naturalistically.

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