Mother-Child Dynamics in the Transmission of Social Anxiety: The Roles of Maternal Verbal Communication and Child Attention

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PROJECT SUMMARY Maternal social anxiety is associated with child social anxiety, suggesting that mothers transmit social anxiety to their children. One pathway to explain this transmission is through children’s social learning from their mothers. Late childhood is an important period for the onset of social anxiety and social anxiety emerging during this period is associated with adverse life outcomes. Thus, there is critical need to understand the social processes through which children acquire social anxiety from their mothers during this period. Children may acquire social anxiety as a result of attending to their mothers’ negative verbal communication regarding social situations. Our preliminary findings provided support for this hypothesis showing that maternal negative verbal communication mediates the transmission of social fear from mothers to children. However, how maternal social anxiety shapes the moment-to-moment dynamics of mother-child communication regarding fear-relevant stimuli is largely unknown. More socially anxious mothers may transmit social anxiety to their children through negative verbal communication and/or by facilitating a rigid dyadic interaction pattern during which children attend to negative social input for extensive durations. This project’s aims are to (a) examine whether maternal negative verbal communication mediates the influence of maternal social anxiety on children’s laboratory- based social fear, (b) examine whether mother-child dyadic rigidity (i.e., perseveration in child attending to negative maternal input) mediates the influence of maternal social anxiety on children’s laboratory-based social fear, (c) examine the mediating roles of maternal negative verbal communication and dyadic rigidity in the association between maternal social anxiety and child social anxiety 6 months later. One hundred 9-12-year- old children and their mothers will participate in one laboratory visit and complete questionnaires 2-weeks before and 6 months after this visit. During the visit, dyads will complete a mother-child social interaction task during which mothers will talk about two hypothetical peers with their children. Prior to this task, mothers will receive positive information regarding one peer and negative information regarding the other peer. Mothers will be instructed to show the pictures of these peers during conversations. Child participants will wear comfortable mobile eye-tracking glasses and their visual attention to the two peer pictures and their mother’s face will be tracked during the conversations. Child attention to maternal positive and negative social input will be examined using a dynamic systems method (i.e., state space grids). Upon completion of this project, I will have tested two possible mechanisms by which mothers may transmit social anxiety to their children. The proposed study will make a significant contribution to the scientific knowledge on how mothers transfer social anxiety to their children and may provide a novel target for family-based interventions. I will also receive in-depth training in (a) theories and methods of dynamic systems approaches, (b) use of mobile eye-tracking in the context of dynamic social interactions and (c) interventions used in the prevention of childhood anxiety problems.