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Using Person-Centered Approaches to Examine Individual Differences in Attention and Socioemotional Development

Thu, March 21, 9:30 to 11:00am, Hilton Baltimore, Floor: Level 1, Peale A

Integrative Statement

Historically, much of the developmental literature has focused on broad patterns of behavior and knowledge, presuming that constructs of interest represent fairly-universal patterns of development that have stable, shared mechanisms. To this extent, the available data primarily speak to nomothetic patterns of development. In addition, there has been a traditional divide between cognitive, “affect-neutral” mechanisms of development, and socioemotional mechanisms that are thought to function prior to, or in spite of, cognitive control mechanisms.

Yet, we know that children differ in the timing, rate, and extent of both cognitive and socioemotional development, and that these mechanisms are interwoven in both daily functioning and long-term outcomes. Understanding these interconnections will help us better understand variation within and across individuals, revealing more complex developmental mechanisms. A well-powered individual difference study requires larger samples chosen to reflect heterogeneity across the constructs/mechanisms of interests. Children are then asked to complete multiple paradigms designed to target conditions or processes that are tied to the variations of interest.

This presentation will draw on two studies to illustrate how researchers can take on an individual differences approach. Both studies build on the argument that individual differences in attention may shape socioemotional development. Temperamentally extreme children preferentially attend to novelty and uncertainty as infants, show greater difficulty deploying attention when under stress as young children, and, by adolescence, preferentially attend to threat-cues. Although the literature presupposes that the link between attention and socioemotional functioning arises early in life, this proposition has had little direct empirical testing.

The first study examines the early emergence of the temperament-emotion-attention link in a large (N=260) cross-sectional study of infants between the ages of 4- and 24-months. The protocol included three eye-tracking tasks (Dot-Probe, Overlap, Vigilance) capturing associated components of attention to threat questionnaires and laboratory observation of temperament, and maternal self-report. We will present a latent profile analysis (LPA) characterizing patterns of affect-biased attention across tasks. We found that negative affect increases with age, t=2.15, p=0.03, which in turn is associated with affect-biased attention, t=2.13, p=0.04, but only in conjunction with elevated maternal anxiety, ab = 0.004, 95% CI=[0.000, 0.010] (Figure 1).

The second study involved 9-to-12 year-old children (N=180) and examined the impact of attention training on socioemotional functioning. At baseline, we created a biobehavioral profile using LPA incorporating attention bias to threat in two tasks (Dot-Probe and Affective Posner) and two EEG-based markers of risk (EEG Frontal Asymmetry and Delta-Beta Coupling). First, we found that temperament was associated with lower levels of effortful control as the probability of displaying the risk profile increased, t=-2.96, p=0.004, 95% CI=[-0.028, -0.006] (Figure 2). Second, variation in temperamental behavioral inhibition is most strongly associated with increases in anxiety when the probability of the risk profile was high, t=2.12, p=0.035, 95% CI=[0.005, 0.132].

We will discuss the promises, and complexities, of implementing protocols designed to generate samples with the necessary power to detect variation across individuals and within individuals over time.

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