Affect influences subsequent social attention captured via mobile eye-tracking during dyadic play in young children

• In Event: Timescales in the Study of Social Relationships: From Getting to Know You to Strengthening Bonds

Abstract

Social attention is an important mechanism for building social relationships and positive affect may facilitate the accumulation of social resources (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001; Griffith et al., 2019). Positive affect may elicit more flexibility in social attention, such as bids for shared attention (Redcay et al., 2012) or emotionality (Beltz et al., 2013), throughout a social interaction, acting as a mechanism underlying sustained social interactions. In the current study, we used mobile eye-tracking (MET) to assess second-by-second changes in how affect influences subsequent social attention during dyadic play. Assessing in vivo social attention is particularly important in light of work suggesting the ways in which people attend to their lived environment differs from how they attend to static stimuli (Fu et al., 2019). For example, people tend to look at goal relevant stimuli more than faces during social interactions (MacNeill et al., in press; Woody et al., 2020). Thus, we anticipated that although children would spend most of their time gazing at toys, expressions of positive affect, whether from self or peer, would precede looking at their peer.

14 children (7 age- and sex-matched dyads; 100% white; Mage = 6.02, SDage = 0.77) who provided a total of 7,133 MET and affective data points participated in the current study. At the beginning of the visit, children were fitted with our MET system. Children then engaged in a 5-minute free play. MET data were coded for dwell to peer, toy and other AOIs. Affect data were coded for self- and peer-expressed negative, neutral and positive affect. The density of the collected second-by-second data (Figure 1-1) enabled us to ask how expressed affect may precede social attention. We modeled our data using a multilevel, multinomial regression with social attention as a categorical outcome. We included both self- and peer-expressed affect at concurrent and lags of 1-5 seconds. Additionally, we conducted follow-up robustness tests. First, we inverted the model so that attention predicted self-expressed affect to see if our observed effect was directionally specific. Second, we used permutation testing to examine the temporal interdependencies within the data.

We found that although children spent most of their time gazing at toys, three seconds after self-expressed positive affect children were approximately twice as likely to gaze at their peer (Figure 1-2; odds ratio: 0.48, p = .025). We found no significant results for the other versus peer comparison. In our inverted model, gaze did not predict self-expressed affect, suggesting a directional effect between positive affect and social attention. Permutation testing supported a true temporal interdependency within the observed data. Three seconds after self-expressed positive affect children were more likely to gaze at their peer than at toys (p = .06) or anywhere else in the room (p = .03).

The current study provides initial evidence that positive affect influences social attention in young children potentially marking bids for shared attention or emotionality and elucidating a potential mechanism underlying the development of long-term social relationships.

Authors

• Alicia Vallorani, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Kayla Melissa Brown, Advocates for Human Potential
  Non-Presenting Author

• Xiaoxue Fu, University of South Carolina
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kelley E Gunther, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Leigha Alexandra MacNeill, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Briana Ermanni, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Nelson Hallquist, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author

• Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Non-Presenting Author