Psychology
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Item The Effect of Supportive Social Interaction Priming on Children's Prosocial Comforing Responses to Distressed Others(2016) Brett, Bonnie Erin; Cassidy, Jude A; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The ability to sensitively care for others’ wellbeing develops early in ontogeny and is an important developmental milestone for healthy social, emotional, and moral development. One facet of care for others, prosocial comforting, has been linked with important social outcomes such as peer acceptance and friendship quality, underscoring the importance of determining factors involved in the ability to comfort. Although social support has been linked with a number of important social outcomes, no study has directly examined whether felt social support can foster children’s positive behavior toward others. The purpose of the current investigation was to use an experimental priming paradigm to demonstrate that felt social support a) enhances children’s ability to respond prosocially to the distress of others and b) decreases children’s expressions of personal distress when faced with the distress of another person. Participants were 94 4-year-old children (M = 53.56 months, SD = 3.38 months; 52 girls). Children were randomly assigned to either view pictures of mothers and children in close, personal interactions (supportive social interaction condition), happy women and children in separate pictures, presented side-by-side (happy control condition), or pictures of colorful overlapping shapes (neutral control condition). Each set of 20 pictures was presented in the context of a categorization computer game that participants played 4 times throughout the course of the study. Immediately following the first three computer games, children were given the opportunity to comfort someone who was distressed; twice it was the adult experimenter working with the child, and once it was an unseen infant crying over a monitor that participants had been trained to use. Comforting behaviors and distress/arousal were coded in 10-second time segments and yielded a global comforting score and a distress proportion score for each task. Results indicated that priming condition had no effect on either prosocial comforting behavior or expressions of personal distress. I discuss these null findings in light of the available literatures on priming mental representations in children and on prosocial comforting, and suggest some future directions for continued investigation in both fields.Item The Interaction Between Parenting and Children’s Cortisol Reactivity at Age Three Predicts Increases in Children’s Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms at Age Six(2015) Barrios, Chelsey S.; Dougherty, Lea R; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Little is known about the role of stress reactivity in the emergence of psychopathology across early childhood. In this longitudinal study, we tested the hypothesis that child cortisol reactivity at age three moderates associations between early parenting and children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms from age three to age six. 160 children were assessed at age three and 135 children were reassessed at age six. At age three, we exposed children to stress-inducing laboratory tasks, during which we obtained four salivary cortisol samples, and parental hostility was assessed using an observational parent-child interaction task. At ages three and six, child psychiatric symptoms were assessed using a semi-structured clinical interview with parents. Results indicated that the combination of high child cortisol reactivity and high observed parental hostility at age three was associated with greater concurrent externalizing symptoms at age three and predicted increases in internalizing and externalizing symptoms from age three to age six. Findings highlight that increased stress reactivity, within the context of hostile parenting, plays a role in the emergence of psychopathology from preschool to school entry.Item Stability and Change of Cortisol Reactivity to a Laboratory Stressor from Early to Middle Childhood(2015) Leppert, Katherine A.; Dougherty, Lea R; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examined the stability and change of children’s cortisol reactivity to a laboratory stressor from early to middle childhood and moderators of change. Ninety-six children completed stress-inducing laboratory tasks and provided five salivary cortisol samples at preschool age (T1; M = 49.88 months, SD = 9.51 months) and three years later (T2; M = 87.44 months, SD = 11.42 months). At T1, parents completed clinical interviews assessing child and parent psychopathology. Cortisol reactivity patterns significantly changed from decreasing to increasing reactivity from early to middle childhood. Moreover, preschool psychopathology moderated this change. Children with fewer preschool psychiatric symptoms demonstrated more stable reactivity patterns, whereas children with preschool psychiatric comorbidity demonstrated more unstable reactivity patterns across assessments. Findings suggest a developmental shift from decreasing to increasing cortisol reactivity from early to middle childhood, and highlight early preschool psychopathology as a moderator of change in cortisol reactivity.Item CONTRIBUTIONS OF AGENCY VS. NON-AGENCY TO SEQUENTIAL MEMORY IN 3-YEAR OLDS(2010) Shuck, Lauren Haumesser; Woodward, Amanda L.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Two studies explored the effect of agency on memory in 3-year-old children when learning a sequence in a picture-book format. Previous research has shown that with both adults and older children, the inclusion of agency in free verbal recall is a central theme. However, very young children are often thought to have poor memory for social events because of their verbal limitations. By using a form of deferred imitation, Study 1 explored social episodic memory in a non-verbal sequential reconstruction task. Children who saw an agent in the picture sequence reconstructed more steps than those that did not see an agent present in the picture-books. Study 2 expanded upon these results by investigating the extent to which agency is necessary in order to improve memory, and what properties of the Study 1 increased performance. In this study, participants who were presented with an agent in only the first and last picture of the sequence did not reconstruct more steps than those that did not see an agent present. Taken together, agency may increase memory for a sequence but only if ample amounts of agentive cues are present throughout.