Poster #73 - The Longitudinal Emergence of Social-Emotional Competence in Infants and Toddlers Aged 12-36 Months

• In Event: Poster Session 07

Abstract

Background: Social-emotional development is important for school readiness and child well-being (Denham, 2006; Denham & Brown, 2013). Children with better social emotional skills often have more positive attitudes, behaviors, and academic performance compared to those with fewer skills in this domain (Durlak et al., 2011; Taylor et al., 2017). However, little is known about the normative trajectory of the manifestation of these skills before children are school-aged. Thus, this study aimed to map the longitudinal trajectories of the acquisition of social-emotional competence in infants and toddlers and identify covariates that moderate the normative trajectory.

Methods: In this study, longitudinal mixed-effects modeling was employed to map the trajectories of social-emotional competence in 191 predominantly white children aged 12-36 months (417 visits) and evaluate the effects of covariates related to child characteristics and family environment hypothesized to alter trajectories, including child sex, mother’s education, mother’s occupation, family income, and number of siblings. Social-emotional competence was measured using the parent-reported Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (ITSEA)’s Competence domain, which includes items that measure behaviors assessing compliance, attention, mastery motivation (or persistence in the face of challenges and pleasure in success), imitation and play, empathy, and prosocial peer relations. Data were drawn from the UNC/UMN Baby Connectome Project (Howell et al., 2019).

Results: For mean trajectory, several functional forms were fit, including linear, quadratic, exponential, and logistic forms. According to BIC comparison and assessment of model parameters, the best fitting model of observed scores was a quadratic model. Among the covariates, only sex demonstrated an effect where on average girls started with scores 0.079 points higher than boys (p < 0.001). However, their slopes did not vary significantly by sex (linear term: p = 0.809; quadratic term: p = 0.648). This study expands previous work that established quadratic growth patterns in various social-emotional skills in adolescents and showed evidence that females have higher levels of social-emotional skills even as early as 12 months. Future directions involve using a structural equation modeling approach to model trajectories which will allow for the assessment of and adjustments for measurement invariance and the incorporation of time-varying covariates, such as internalizing symptoms) in order to make stronger inferences concerning change over time and the potential effects of early psychopathology on the development of social-emotional competence. Additionally, it would be useful to map the trajectories of the ITSEA Competence subdomains to assess whether differences in specific domains are driving the overall sex effect or whether the effect is demonstrated broadly.

Authors

• Ekomobong Edet Eyoh, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Jed T. Elison, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities