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Poster #6 - Moderating Effect of Effortful Control on the Relation between Happy Biases and Externalizing Symptoms

Sat, March 23, 8:00 to 9:15am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Effortful Control (EC) is a temperamental trait that allows voluntary control over reactive tendencies. Broadly, low levels of EC are associated with a host of maladaptive behaviors across development (Eisenberg et al., 2009). A body of work suggests that EC may interact with attentional biases to emotionally-valenced stimuli to modulate both internalizing (Lonigan & Vasey, 2009) and externalizing (Morales et al., 2016) behaviors. Although research supports attention biases to threat as a risk factor for internalizing behaviors such as anxiety disorders (Roy et al., 2008), less is known about the relation of attentional biases to more positively valenced stimuli, and how they may interact in children with varying levels of EC. Given the comorbid nature of both internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Willner et al., 2016), the present study tested the interaction of happy bias and effortful control in association with attention to both classes of symptoms.

In a sample of 159 children (Mage = 6.6 years; SD = .71), participants completed a dot probe task in which attention bias to happy faces was computed from button press latency. Additionally, effortful control was measured with the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart et al, 2001). Both internalizing and externalizing symptoms were measured with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenback & Edelbrock, 1983).

Using a Poisson regression, we entered happy bias, effortful control, and their interaction as predictors of internalizing and externalizing symptoms (in separate models). Additionally, the current sample was enriched for Behavioral Inhibition, a temperamental trait that is a risk factor for internalizing behaviors (Chronis-Tuscano et al., 2009). As such, parent report of behavioral inhibition from the Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire was entered as a covariate (BIQ; Bishop et al., 2003).

Testing the model with externalizing symptoms, there was a significant main effect of effortful control on externalizing symptoms, b = -0.38, p < .001. There was also a significant interaction between effortful control and happy bias in predicting externalizing behaviors, b < 0.01, p < .001 (Figure 1). Using a Johnson-Neyman plot to better understand this interaction, effortful control significantly moderated the relation between happy bias and externalizing symptoms for levels of effortful control below 4.91 and above 5.41. For lower levels of effortful control, happy bias negatively related to externalizing symptoms, but for higher levels of effortful control, happy bias potentiated externalizing symptoms (Figure 2). There were no significant main effects or interactions in the model with internalizing symptoms.

Together, these findings suggest that while on the whole, higher levels of effortful control relate to lower levels of externalizing symptoms, these behaviors may interact with individual variation in affective biases. For individuals with a strong attentional bias to happy stimuli, higher levels of reported effortful control may actually present as a risk factor for higher levels of externalizing behaviors. In contrast, lower levels of effortful control may relate to more adaptive outcomes. Despite comorbidities between externalizing and internalizing symptoms in children (b = .59, p < .001 in current sample), the relations were not evident in internalizing scores.

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