Shyness and physiological arousal in anticipation of and following performance in an “online” social task

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Whether introducing oneself to new peers or participating in classroom activities, performing in social contexts is a frequent part of children’s daily life. While some children may approach these situations with ease, the anticipation and/or aftereffects of performing for peers is quite daunting for others, particularly shy children. Shyness is characterized by fearfulness and hypervigilance in novel social settings (Rubin & Coplan, 2004). Shyness and its developmental precursor, behavioral inhibition, are associated with reticence (Walker et al., 2014), error preoccupation (Buzzell et al., 2017), and altered task performance (Wilson & Henderson, 2020) under social conditions. Critically, however, how children’s physiological arousal changes over the course of their engagement in such contexts (namely, leading up to vs. following their performance) has yet to have been systematically explored. The current study uses a novel experimental paradigm to examine changes in children’s physiological arousal in anticipation of, and response to, their turn to perform in a simulated social task, and further explores whether these changes in arousal vary as a function of shyness.

Seventy-eight children between 7 and 9 (M = 7.63, SD = 0.64, 42 female) completed the Child Shyness Questionnaire (CSQ; Crozier, 1995), a self-report measure of temperamental shyness, as well as the Next-in-Line task (NIL; adapted from Brenner, 1973) while their electrocardiogram (ECG) and respiration were continuously recorded. Following a 3.5 min baseline recording, participants were seated at a computer with a microphone before being told they would be interacting with 17 “other children” (prerecorded voices and stock photos) in an online task. The virtual task environment consisted of photos of the children arranged in a circle, with the participant’s image positioned at the bottom (midpoint) of the circle. Participants first introduced themselves to the other children before beginning the NIL task, in which the children went around the circle naming images appearing in the middle of the circle aloud. Of interest are changes in children’s physiological arousal (indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) relative to baseline in the periods preceding and following their turns to speak. Data have been collected in full and are currently being processed. Statistical analyses will be complete by December 2020.

It is hypothesized RSA changes will be predicted by an interaction between task phase (preceding vs. following performance) and shyness. Specifically, it is hypothesized that RSA will increase prior to participants’ turns to speak, reflecting the anticipation of their performance (H1). By contrast, in the period following performance, it is hypothesized RSA will remain significantly higher for children higher in shyness relative to children lower in shyness (H2). Hypotheses will be tested using multilevel models with change in RSA as the dependent variable. To evaluate H1, period (preceding vs. following performance) will be entered as a Level-1 (within-subjects) predictor, and to evaluate H2, shyness will be entered as a Level-2 (between-subjects) predictor. These findings will provide insight into the moment-to-moment physiological processes underlying shy and non-shy children’s experiences of social performance, with important implications for basic research and application in classroom settings.

Authors

• McLennon Wilson, Cape Breton University
  Presenting Author

• Kaitlyn Crook, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author

• Heather Henderson, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author