Trajectories of Behavioral Inhibition and Risk for Anxiety

描述（由申请人提供）：随着儿童从小学过渡到中学，他们的社会环境发生了变化，包括接触不熟悉的同龄人和重组现有的同龄人群体，这产生了一些挑战。有些孩子很容易应对这些变化和新的挑战，而另一些孩子则有更大的困难。一个孩子的气质可能会影响他们在这个过程中的成功或失败。行为抑制的儿童在整个中学时期和进入青春期时可能特别容易受到社会适应问题的影响。行为抑制是一种气质，在儿童早期发现，涉及对新奇事物的高度敏感，从轻度压力和不熟悉的事件中退缩，以及社交沉默。我们招募了一个大的队列（n=315）的婴儿，并仔细描述了他们的气质倾向，在婴儿期和幼儿期的行为抑制。我们现在希望在这些儿童进入中学之前（10-11岁）和他们过渡到青春期早期（12-13岁）后不久看到他们。我们将观察他们与熟悉和不熟悉的同龄人的社交能力，并评估他们对威胁的注意力偏差，以及认知自我监控，以详细了解在这一重要的发展时期，影响从气质到适应或适应不良结果的社会和认知机制。我们独特而创新的方法涉及儿童10-11岁时与熟悉和不熟悉的同龄人进行二元社会互动的行为观察，该年龄段的认知因素评估，以及生物因素和学校环境的问卷测量。我们将使用这些数据来预测同龄人的社交能力以及12-13岁时精神病理学的发病率。这种方法将使我们能够确定特定的社会和认知机制如何调节行为抑制的初始儿童气质，以增加或减少社会适应不良和精神病理学发病率升高的风险。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As children transition from elementary to middle school, there are changes to their social context that include exposure to unfamiliar age mates and reorganization of existing peer groups which generate a number of challenges to be met. Some children negotiate these changes and new challenges easily, while others have greater difficulty. A child's temperament may influence their success or failure in this process. Behavioral Inhibited children may be particularly vulnerable to problems in social adaptation across the middle school years and into adolescence. Behavioral Inhibition is a temperament, identified early in childhood that involves heightened sensitivity to novelty, withdrawal from mildly stressful and unfamiliar events, and social reticence. We have recruited a large cohort (n=315) of infants and have carefully characterized their temperamental disposition to behavioral inhibition over the period of infancy and early childhood. We now wish to see these children before they enter middle school (10-11 years of age) and then soon after they transition to early adolescence (12-13 years of age). We will observe their social competence with familiar and unfamiliar peers and assess their attention bias to threat, as well as cognitive self-monitoring, in order to gain a detailed understanding of the social and cognitive mechanisms that influence the pathways from temperament to adaptive or maladaptive outcomes during this important period of development. Our unique and innovative approach involves behavioral observation of dyadic social interaction with familiar and unfamiliar peers when children are 10-11 years of age, assessment of cognitive factors at that age, as well as questionnaire measures of biological factors and school context. We will use these data to predict social competence in a peer group as well as incidence of psychopathology at age 12-13. This approach will allow us to identify how specific social and cognitive mechanisms moderate initial child temperament of behavioral inhibition to increase or diminish the risk for poor social adaptation and heightened incidence of psychopathology.