Poster #118 - Exploring Associations Between Child Temperament and Social Attention in Preschool-Aged Children

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

A child’s inherent temperament may affect later social development (Leppänen & Nelson, 2009), and one proposed mechanism by which this could occur is through social attention preferences (Aktar et al., 2016). While some temperamental traits lead to an avoidance of negative stimuli, other traits may make it difficult to disengage attention from this type of information. For example, depressed children have been shown to avoid sad faces and prefer happy faces (e.g., Harrison & Gibb, 2015), while anxious children show hyper-vigilance to threatening faces (e.g., Seefeldt et al., 2013). These findings are often reported in school-aged children and adolescents, but few studies have asked these questions in preschool-aged children. The current study will therefore extend past work to ask whether 1) preschoolers with higher temperamental sadness show an avoidance of sad faces, and 2) preschoolers with higher temperamental fear show a preference for threat-relevant (fearful) faces, with difficulty disengaging attention from these faces over time (e.g., see Fu & Pérez-Edgar, 2018).

The current sample included 60 three- to five-year-olds (M(age)=4.1 years, SD=1.0). Each child saw five side-by-side pairs of emotional faces (combinations of sad, happy, fearful, neutral), each presented twice for 6 seconds (sides counterbalanced). Gaze was recorded using an SMI RED 120 Hz eye-tracker. The caregiver then completed the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire, Short Form (CBQ-SF; Putnam et al., 2006), a 94-item measure assessing temperament. Analyses focused on sad/happy and fearful/neutral pairings, and a negative bias difference score was calculated for each pair. For CBQ-SF, Fear and Sadness subscales were calculated.

For sad/happy pairs, a marginal negative correlation was found between CBQ-SF Sadness and sad face bias (r(48)=−.27, p=.06; Figure 1), suggesting a trend towards avoidance of sad faces (and preference for happy faces) in those with increased temperamental sadness. For fearful/neutral pairs, a significant positive correlation was found between CBQ-SF Fear and fearful face bias (r(51)=.32, p=.02; Figure 2). To examine difficulty disengaging from fearful faces across the trial, correlations were run separately for the first half and second half of stimulus presentation, and results showed that the overall correlation was driven by difficulty disengaging attention in the latter half of the trial for those with increased temperamental fear (r(54)=.31, p=.02), with no association found for the first half of the trial (p=.73).

In the current study, preschoolers higher on temperamental sadness showed a trend for an attentional bias away from sad faces and towards happy faces; this is consistent with past work in older children and suggests a mechanism by which these children may try to regulate their mood (Harrison & Gibb, 2015). It was also found that preschoolers higher on traits of fear showed an attentional bias towards fearful faces, with increasing difficulty disengaging from fearful faces over time (see also, Fu & Pérez-Edgar, 2018); this bias may create a feedback loop whereby threatening stimuli cause even more fear in children (In-Albon et al., 2009). Future work will continue to examine how different aspects of temperament might influence social development later in life.

Authors

• Julia R Moses, City University of New York The Graduate Center
  Presenting Author

• Adriana L Hamdani, College of Staten Island

• Jennifer B Wagner, City University of New York College of Staten Island