Poster #68 - Shyness, Engagement, and Conversational Response Times in Children's Dyadic Interactions with an Unfamiliar Peer

• In Event: Poster Session 11

Abstract

To be a fun and desirable social partner, a child must come prepared to engage flexibly and dynamically with peers across a variety of tasks and contexts. This flexibility may be particularly important for temperamentally shy children, whose behavior is characterized by fear, wariness, and the tendency to withdraw in response to social novelty and socially evaluative contexts (Henderson et al., 2004; Rubin & Coplan, 2004; Walker et al., 2015). Past work demonstrates shy children exhibit exaggerated orienting responses to salient social cues (e.g., Morales et al., 2017), and that proactive, flexible self-regulatory strategies act as protective factors against the development of social anxiety among shy and behaviorally inhibited (BI) children (e.g., Valadez et al., 2021). However, it remains unclear by what mechanism flexible attention allocation and regulation supports children’s social development in daily life. Building on recent adult work relating conversational response times (RTs) to indices of social engagement and connection (Templeton et al., 2022), the current study investigates conversational RT as a novel index of children’s social engagement in a dyadic context, and further explores the relation between shyness and children’s RTs when conversing with a new peer for the first time.
Fifty-six 9- to 11-year-old children (mean age=10.20, SD=0.84, 36 girls) spread across 28 age- and gender-matched dyads participated in a study of temperament, cognition, and social development. Children independently completed the Child Shyness Questionnaire (CSQ; Crozier, 1995), a 26-item self-report measure of shyness. Upon first meeting their dyadic partner, participants were seated at a table and instructed to ‘get to know each other’ for five minutes, with no additional guidelines or structure provided as part of the interaction (Usher et al., 2015). Two independent teams of coders later coded children’s behavior, with one team classifying children’s utterances and closely recording their RTs in turn-taking conversation, while the other focused more globally on children’s individual levels ofsocial engagement.
Two Actor-Partner Interdependence Models (APIMs) were run to examine 1) whether faster conversational RT was related to greater observations of social engagement in children themselves (H1) and/or in their partners (H2), and 2) whether self-reported shyness predicted slower RTs in children themselves (H3) and/or in their partners (H4).
Children displayed a wide range of communicative behaviors (seeks, shares, responses, reactions), as well as conversational RTs similar to those exhibited by adults (e.g., Stivers et al., 2009; Templeton et al., 2022). Supporting H1, it was found that faster conversational RTs predicted higher levels of children’s own social engagement, b=-2.09, t=-3.52, p<.001, while the relation to partner’s social engagement (H2) was marginally significant, b=-1.17, t=-1.96, p=.055. Failing to support H3, children’s shyness was unrelated to their own turn-taking RT, b=-0.004, t=-0.87, p=.388. Notably, and in contrast to the predictions of H4, children’s shyness was found to be negatively related to their partners RTs (i.e., faster responding), b=-0.011, t=-2.18, p=.035. New directions for the use of RT as an ecologically valid index of children’s flexible social engagement, as well as implications for theories relating shyness to attention regulation and social behavior, are discussed.

Authors

• McLennon Wilson, Cape Breton University
  Presenting Author

• Adrienne Richter Powell

• Linda Sosa-Hernandez, University of Waterloo

• Emma Sophia Green, University of Waterloo

• Claudia Labahn, University of Waterloo

• Heather Henderson, University of Waterloo