Relations of emotion-related temperamental characteristics to attentional biases and social functioning.

Abstract

The current study examined whether an important temperamental characteristic, effortful control (EC), moderates the associations between dispositional anger and sadness, attention biases, and social functioning in a group of preschool-aged children (N = 77). Preschoolers' attentional biases toward angry and sad facial expressions were assessed using eye-tracking, and we obtained teachers' reports of children's temperament and social functioning. Associations of dispositional anger and sadness with time looking at relevant negative emotional stimuli were moderated by children's EC, but relations between time looking at emotional faces and indicators of social functioning, for the most part, were direct and not moderated by EC. In particular, time looking at angry faces (and low EC) predicted high levels of aggressive behaviors, whereas longer time looking at sad faces (and high EC) predicted higher social competence. Finally, latency to detect angry faces predicted aggressive behavior under conditions of average and low levels of EC. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of differentiating between components of attention biases toward distinct negative emotions, and implications for attention training. (PsycINFO Database Record

Temperamental Emotionality Attributes as Antecedents of Children's Social Information Processing

“…Although this may be interpreted as providing some support for the regulatory model, it was substantially outweighed by the preponderance of null results. In addressing the question of why our findings are inconsistent with the previous findings on effortful control as a moderator of dimensions of temperamental negative emotionality (e.g., Lonigan & Vasey, ; Nozadi et al., ), it is important to note that moderation is not necessarily the only viable hypothesis that follows from the widely accepted premise that effortful control regulates emotional reactivity. Another possibility is that effortful control directly reduces the frequency and intensity of temperamental fear and anger.…”

“…For the six pictures, predefined areas of interest (AOIs) for measurement of attention consisted of each of the three child faces in the matrix, with the AOIs fit to the contour of the entire face. In accord with previous research on visual search tasks (e.g., Armstrong & Olatunji, 2012;Nozadi et al, 2018), children's encoding of the emotional stimuli was quantified by their latency to first fixate within the AOIs capturing attention to the angry, neutral, and happy faces. Data were considered missing if children did not fixate on an AOI for the majority (i.e., at least 4 of the 6) of story illustrations, resulting in missing data for an average of 9% of the children at each wave.…”

“…Although encoding is widely regarded as organizing interpretations and response decisions to social challenges, research has yet to clearly delineate the nature of interrelationships among processing stages and behavioral functioning (Crick & Dodge, 1994;Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000). For example, biases toward and away from threatening stimuli have both been related to more hostile attributions, interpretations, and behaviors (e.g., Horsley, Orobio de Castro, & Van der Schoot, 2010;Nozadi, Spinrad, Johnson, & Eisenberg, 2018;White, Suway, Pine, Bar-Haim, & Fox, 2011). In the second processing stage, children are theorized to interpret the social cues by attributing intent to the peers in the transgression.…”

“…Thus, it is plausible that angry temperamental dispositions may bias children toward attending to threatening (i.e., angry) social cues, attributing greater hostile intent to peers, and generating poorer solutions to the challenges with peers. For example, cross‐sectional findings have shown that children who experience heightened irritability are more likely to attend to angry faces, hold more hostile attributions of peers, and engage in rigid, inflexible ways of coping with social problems (DiLiberto, Katz, Beauchamp, & Howells, ; Nozadi et al., ). In contrast, although constructs that are related to temperamental fear (e.g., anxiety symptoms) have been empirically linked with specific negative SIP dimensions (e.g., encoding of negative cues; Dudeney, Sharpe, & Hunt, ), other studies have found negligible or negative associations between distress and SIP dimensions (e.g., Dodd et al., ; Nozadi et al., ).…”

“…To account for the modest and inconsistent findings on mood congruence, the regulatory model is rooted in the assumption that the potency of reactive forms of temperamental negative emotionality as predictors of social functioning are moderated by children's effortful control (e.g., Lonigan & Vasey, ; Stifter & Dollar, ). More specifically, any tendency for temperamental anger and fear to increase negative patterns of information processing is proposed to be dampened or offset when children with high levels of effortful control effectively modulate their reflexive emotional impulses and voluntarily shift attention and processing away from threats (e.g., Lonigan & Vasey, ; Nozadi et al., ). Research examining the interaction between indices of effortful control and negative emotionality has yielded some support for the regulatory model.…”