Observed behavioral shyness leads to more automatic imitation in early childhood

• In Event: Mechanisms underlying imitation, social learning, and social preferences

Abstract

Although there is evidence to suggest that childhood shyness can result in negative psychological outcomes (e.g., Tang et al., 2017), new work has found that shy children possess unique social cognitive advantages, such as sophisticated Theory of Mind (e.g., Wellman et al., 2011) and heightened sensitivity to others’ expressions of anger (LoBue & Perez-Edgar, 2014). However, to our knowledge, no work has examined shy children’s cognitive self-other processing.
The automatic imitation task (AIT) involves presentation of action videos while simultaneously cuing the participant to make congruent or incongruent actions (see Figure 1). Calculating other-related interference in these tasks provides a behavioral index of motor resonance in the brain. Automatic imitation has been found to be reduced in populations such as narcissists (Obhi et al., 2014) and individuals of relatively low socioeconomic status (Farwaha & Obhi, 2020). However, the AIT has yet to be explored in shy preschoolers, who possess heightened self-consciousness and self-awareness, and are at a time period that is developmentally critical for the understanding of others.
We assessed behavioral shyness in 62 typically developing five-year-olds (T1; Mage= 66.5 months, SD= 2.8). Thirty-eight children (61%) returned at age 6 (T2; Mage= 77.9 months, SD= 2.8) and participated in the AIT. We experienced a relatively high dropout rate due to the COVID19 pandemic occurring in the midst of T2 data collection.
We assessed behavioral shyness through two tasks: 1) a self-presentation task in which children were spontaneously asked to give a speech about their most recent birthday in front of a video camera, and 2) an encountered stranger task in which an unfamiliar experimenter approached the child in an empty laboratory playroom. Children were coded for avoidance behaviors (= 0.76) and time spent looking away from social stimuli (= 0.73) during the self-presentation task. We also scored participants’ fearful expressions during the stranger approach task (= 0.64). Given that all three behaviors were intercorrelated, we created a conceptually and empirically derived composite of observed behavioral shyness.
From the AIT, we recorded children’s error rate (ER) and reaction times (RT) for 80 trials (40 congruent, 40 incongruent) and calculated the interference effect of each by subtracting performance on congruent trials from incongruent trials. We also computed inverse efficiency interference by dividing RT by proportion of correct responses (1-ER) for congruent and incongruent trials and subsequently subtracting them.
We found that, when controlling for family income, observed shyness at age 5 predicted higher interference in error rate, F(2, 35)= 5.43, p= 0.01, and inverse efficiency, F(2, 35)= 3.54, p= 0.04, at age 6. The relation between T1 shyness and T2 reaction time interference approached statistical significance, F(2, 35)= 2.62, p= 0.08. Thus, early shyness appears to facilitate children’s tendency to automatically resonate with others. This work has implications for our understanding of shy children’s social cognitive development, particularly regarding their sensitivity to social cues. That is, greater automatic resonance may reflect a mechanism underlying power deference to others consistently observed in shy individuals and also may facilitate known adaptive features of shyness.

Authors

• Taigan MacGowan, Queen’s University
  Presenting Author

• Suhkvinder Obhi, McMaster University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Louis A. Schmidt, McMaster University
  Non-Presenting Author