Poster #208 - Behavioral Inhibition and Emotion Understanding: Contributions of Inhibitory Control and Passive Attention

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Behavioral inhibition has been considered as a risk factor for social withdrawal (Fox, Henderson, Rubin, Calkins, & Schmidt, 2001; Pérez-Edgar et al., 2011) and low social competence (Bohlin, Uppsala, Bengtsgard, & Andersson, 2000). However, some of shy-withdrawn children, especially those who were low physiological reactivity, would exhibit more advanced social cognitive abilities, such as theory of mind in later childhood (Lane et al., 2013; Wellman et al., 2011).This study aimed to explore the relation between behavioral inhibition and social cognition focused on emotion understanding. We argued that inhibitory control may moderate the relations between behavioural inhibition and social cognition, because inhibited children who can better control their behaviors may have more chance to engage in and learn from social interaction, though they may only silently watch (e.g., passive attention). We also examined the effect of children’s passive attention and positive social expressions during painful situations on their later emotion understanding.
Participants were 101 Chinese children (57 boys) selected from an ongoing longitudinal study examining the role of temperament in the development of social adaptation. At the first visit (M = 31.2 months), Children’s behavioral inhibition was assessed by a series of behavioral tasks (e.g., asked to touch a lion mask, a toy snake, or a black box, and interaction with a clown, a robot or a toy tunnel), and children’s inhibitory control was measured by snack delay task. Besides, we measured children’s passive attention (look at injured but keep reticent) and positive social expressions (prosocial vocalization) toward others’ distress in affective empathy task. One year later (M = 44.3 months), Children’s emotion understanding was assessed by Affect Knowledge Test (Denham, 1986).
Inhibitory control rather than behavioral inhibition positively predicted later emotion understanding after controlling for children’s age (see Table 1). Regression analyses indicated that the relation between inhibition and emotion understanding was moderated by inhibitory control. More specifically, for children with low inhibitory control, inhibition was negatively associated with emotion understanding, while positive relation between inhibition and emotion understanding was found among children with high inhibitory control (see Figure 1). Besides, inhibited children showed less passive attention during empathy, and children who showed more passive attention developed better emotion understanding, while children’s positive social expression negatively predicted emotion understanding (see Table 1).
These results demonstrated the important role of inhibitory control in behaviorally inhibited children’s emotion understanding. Inhibited children who have better inhibitory control can precisely distinguish others’ emotion, although they may rarely show prosocial behavior. Although the mediate effect of passive attention on behavioral inhibition and emotion understanding was not found, our study revealed that low inhibited children displayed more passive attention during social interaction, and children’s passive attention promotes their emotion understanding.

Authors

• Shuyi Zhai, Zhejiang University
  Presenting Author

• Shuiyun Du, Zhejiang University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jie He, Zhejiang University
  Non-Presenting Author