Individual and Dyadic Associations Between Temperamental Shyness and Emotional Flexibility Amongst Pre-Adolescent Unfamiliar Peer Dyads.

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Children high in temperamental shyness tend to be reticent and wary in novel social situations, making it difficult for them to form high quality peer relationships (Coplan et al., 2012). Research based on trait measures suggests that shy children’s emotional regulation abilities may alter the quality of their interactions with unfamiliar peers (e.g., Cohen & Mendez, 2009). However, these measurement approaches fail to capture the interpersonal, dynamic, and context-specific nature of emotions that peers employ in real-life interactions. As such, emotional flexibility may be more reflective of how emotions are regulated during real-time social interactions (Hollenstein et al., 2013). Emotional flexibility involves the range and shifts in and out of emotion states across time. Therefore, the objectives of the present observational study are to: 1) investigate the impact of temperamental shyness on a child’s own and their partner’s emotional flexibility, and 2) examine the extent to which dyadic similarity in shyness influences dyad-level emotional flexibility during an interaction among unfamiliar peers.

Participants included 62 children between the ages of 9 and 11 (42 females; Mage = 10.17 years, SD = 0.77). Temperamental shyness was assessed through a composite of parent and child reports on the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire-Revised (Capaldi & Rothbarth, 1992). Participants were randomly paired with an unfamiliar peer (matched on age and gender) and instructed to ‘get to know each other’ in a 5-minute unstructured in-lab interaction (Usher et al., 2018). Dyadic interactions were videotaped, and a modified version of the Specific Affect coding system will be applied (Gottman et al., 1995). The presence or absence of positive, neutral, and negative affect will be coded in real-time for each dyad member and plotted on state space grids in GridWare to assess emotional flexibility. Three indices of emotional flexibility will be derived at the individual and dyadic level: dispersion (i.e., spread of emotional states), transitions (i.e., number of affect changes per minute), and rigidity (i.e., average duration of each expressed emotion). Data have been collected and coding is underway in preparation for statistical analyses, which will be completed by February 2021.

To address the first objective, Actor-Partner Interdependence Models via multilevel modeling will be estimated to test the hypothesis that high shyness will be associated with lower emotional flexibility in the child (actor effect) and their previously unfamiliar partner (partner effect). To examine the second objective, dyadic similarity scores on shyness will be computed by subtracting the absolute difference between partners (higher scores will reflect higher similarity). A series of multi-level models will test the hypothesis that unfamiliar peers who are more similar in their levels of shyness will demonstrate higher dyadic emotional flexibility (i.e., broader range of dyadic emotional states, more transitions between dyadic emotions states, and less time stuck in one dyadic emotion state). Taken together, findings will provide novel insights into the dyadic relations between shyness and real-time emotion processes during interactions between unfamiliar peers, holding important implications for basic research and interventions seeking to foster friendship formation among children with varying temperaments.

Authors

• Linda Sosa-Hernandez, University of Waterloo
  Presenting Author

• Heather Henderson, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author