About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 6. Developmental Psychopathology

Abstract

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Behavioral inhibition (BI), or temperamental wariness to novel stimuli, is one of the best predictors of social anxiety, with about 40% of behaviorally inhibited infants being later diagnosed (Clauss and Blackford, 2012; Kagan et al., 1984). However, this leaves a large portion of variance unaccounted for in determining which inhibited children will develop clinical levels of anxiety. The Detection and Dual Control (DDC) Framework states that salience detection, such as error-related negativity (ERN; a neurological event that occurs after making an error on a task), plays a role in inhibited children learning to become hypervigilant of their mistakes, leading to later anxiety (Brooker & Buss, 2014; Fox et al., 2023). The DDC framework additionally proposes that parental characteristics may modify this relation; while several characteristics have been found to predict which inhibited infants will later develop anxiety, one that has not been studied is parental anxiety sensitivity (PAS; Fox et al., 2023). PAS is a parent’s fears or anxieties about the potentially harmful outcomes of their child’s anxiety and has been shown to predict children’s anxiety (i.e., Francis & Roemhild, 2021; Fiask et al., 2012). Thus, this study attempts to explore this facet of parenting to see if it further predicts which inhibited children will later develop larger ERN. We predict that PAS will moderate the relation between BI and ERN, in that among inhibited children, those with parents higher in PAS will develop larger ERN values.
Participants for this study include 63 mother-child dyads (mothers 98.4% white, 100% not Hispanic; children 47.6% female, 92.1% white, 96.8% not Hispanic) taken from a larger longitudinal study. At ages 1 and 2, children completed a battery of 5 episodes for an observational measure of BI (Fox et al., 2001). At age 4, mothers completed a measure of PAS (a modified version of the Parental Anxiety Sensitivity and Reactivity scale, Taylor et al., 2007). At age 5, children completed a modified flanker EEG task to measure ERN (Brooker & Buss, 2014). Multiple imputation was performed to correct for missing data. Results supported our hypothesis that PAS significantly moderated the relation between BI and ERN (b = 0.28, SE = 0.14, t = 2.07, p = .039). The region of significance indicated that the relation between BI and ERN shifted to significance at 2.17 SD above the mean of PAS (see Figure 1).
Our results support the DDC framework’s theory that parenting characteristics, such as PAS, play a role in children’s monitoring of their own errors (Fox et al., 2023). For already inhibited children, parents that displayed high PAS lead to larger child ERN values. Perhaps parents who are overly worried about their child’s anxiety reinforce when their inhibited child is hypervigilant of their errors. This reinforcement of the child’s hypervigilance may teach a child that it is important to be aware of mistakes, and ultimately lead to the child to develop clinical levels of anxiety. Thus, reducing parent's own anxiety towards their child may halt the development of social anxiety among inhibited children.

Author information

Author	Role
Allison Morra, Miami University	Presenting author
Ella J Amaral Lavoie, Miami University	Non-presenting author
Robin D Thomas, Miami University	Non-presenting author
Elizabeth J Kiel, Miami University	Non-presenting author

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