Poster #207 - Attention to Social Reward Stimuli in Children: Associations with Children’s Temperament and Parenting Reactions

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

Integrative Statement

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperamental style marked by social withdrawal, negative affect and heightened risk for developing social anxiety. Although evidence suggests that certain caregiving strategies may help to buffer social anxiety risk (Fox et al., 2005), limited research has explored how parenting may influence children’s attention to social cues (Olson et al., 2011; Chevallier, et al., 2012), and few have examined neural markers of social cue processing, especially among temperamentally vulnerable children. Since parenting reactions to children’s behavior has been shown to influence attention to social interactions in children (James et al., 2018; Kessel, et al., 2013), the goal of the current study was to examine how parenting strategies impact neural markers of attention to social cues among inhibited children. We predicted that positive parenting would be associated with greater neural reactivity to social cues among inhibited children.
Participants were fifty-three children (27 males; Mage=8.32 years) and their parents. Children completed a picture-viewing task where they viewed and rated 134 social reward images on their valence and arousal. Stimuli examined comprised of 3 categories: 1) interpersonal social reward, depicting positive social interactions, 2) intrapersonal social reward, depicting happy people with no social interactions (e.g., smiling children), and 3) a neutral comparison category. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded throughout the task and the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential (ERP) which indexes motivational relevance of stimuli (Schupp, et al., 2000), was processed for each image category. Children’s inhibited behavior and negative affect was assessed via parent report using the child version of the Behavioral Inhibition/Behavioral Activation Scale (BIS/BAS; White & Carver, 2004) and Temperament in Middle Childhood Questionnaire (TMCQ; Simmonds & Rothbart, 2006), respectively. Parent’s endorsement of positive parenting (i.e., emotion-focused responses) and negative parenting (i.e., minimization) reactions was examined using the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES; Fabes, 1990).
An interaction between child’s inhibited behavior and positive parenting reactions emerged predicting interpersonal LPP amplitudes (b=3.96, p=.020) such that highly inhibited children whose parents endorsed greater positive parenting exhibited larger LPPs to interpersonal reward images (b=3.89, p=.039). An interaction between child’s inhibited behavior and negative parenting also emerged predicting the interpersonal LPP (b=2.44, p=.041). Namely, inhibited children whose parents endorsed greater negative parenting reactions exhibited larger LPPs to interpersonal reward images (b=3.23, p=.017).
Contrary to our hypothesis, both positive and negative parenting styles were associated with increased attention to social cues in highly inhibited children. These patterns suggest that that either supportive or dismissing comments from parents may assist temperamentally inhibited children to better handle high levels of negative affect and allow them attend to social cues. Alternatively, supportive parenting may increase an inhibited child’s motivation to attend to social cues by providing strategies to handle emotions and reappraise situations. In contrast, negative parenting may increase attention to social cues in an inhibited child due to experiencing social interactions with parents as unpredictable or unpleasant. Altogether, these data establish novel directions for examining neural markers of the impact of parenting on trajectories of risk among temperamentally inhibited children.

Authors

• Varun Sridhar, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  Non-Presenting Author

• Adaeze C. Egwuatu, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer M. McDermott, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  Non-Presenting Author