Poster #119 - From Early Behavioral Inhibition to Young Adults’ Observed Anxiety During an Online Speech Task

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

As many school and job opportunities have moved from in-person to online, the ability to socially perform well in front of others in online contexts has become critical for one’s academic and career success (Quintana, 2020). Online social performance situations elicit increased physiological stress and anxiety, mimicking social stress responses in in-person performance situations (Gunnar et al., 2021). However, little is known about the factors that predict individual differences in expressed anxiety during online social performance situations. Behavioral inhibition, an early temperament reflecting fearful and wary behaviors to unfamiliar stimuli, is one of the best-known predictors of social anxiety in childhood and adolescence (Sandstrom et al., 2020), and social anxiety in turn has been associated with expressed anxiety in social performance situations assessed in the lab (Morrison et al., 2016). In this study, we examined whether behavioral inhibition in toddlerhood predicts young adults’ expressed anxiety during a face-to-face online performance situation as mediated by social anxiety symptoms in childhood/adolescence.
The sample included 291 infants (54% female) and their mothers who were recruited for a longitudinal study examining the role of early temperament in socioemotional development. Behavioral inhibition was assessed at ages 2 and 3 through behavioral observations and parent-reports of children’s social fear on the Toddler Behavior Assessment Questionnaire. Child/adolescent social anxiety was assessed using an average score of parent- and self-report ratings on the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders at ages 9, 12, and 15. At age 18, participants completed an online speech task over Zoom during which they were asked to spend 1-minute preparing a speech for a job interview and then deliver a 5-minute speech about their strengths and weaknesses in the workplace. Physical and verbal anxiety were coded by trained research assistants from video recordings and their interrater reliability was high (ICC = .79, .80).
Structural equation modeling was used to address our objective. As shown in Figure 1, expressed speech anxiety was constructed as a latent factor with physical and verbal anxiety as its indicators. Behavioral inhibition was positively associated with child/adolescent social anxiety, which in turn was positively associated with young adults’ observed speech anxiety over Zoom. The indirect effect from behavioral inhibition to observed speech anxiety over Zoom through child/adolescent social anxiety was significant, β = .05, p = .045, 95% CI [.001, .009].
This study identified a developmental pathway from early behavioral inhibition to expressed anxiety in a face-to-face online social performance situation in young adulthood, mediated by social anxiety symptoms in childhood/adolescence. Given that most research on this topic is based on in-person laboratory paradigms, these findings extend our understanding by showing that behavioral inhibition may be a risk factor for heightened anxiety in an online context through higher levels of social anxiety in childhood/adolescence. Taken together, reducing social anxiety symptoms in childhood/adolescence among behaviorally inhibited children may help prevent the expression of anxiety in online social performance situations.

Authors

• Alena Quinn, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Selin Zeytinoglu, University of Maryland - College Park

• Emma Sophia Green, University of Waterloo

• Santiago Morales, University of Southern California

• Kristie Poole, Brock University

• Heather Henderson, University of Waterloo

• Daniel S. Pine, National Institutes of Health

• Nathan A Fox, University of Maryland - College Park