Early family system types predict children’s emotional attention biases at school age

Abstract

Abstract:The family environment shapes children's social information processing and emotion regulation. Yet, the long-term effects of early family systems have rarely been studied. This study investigated how family system types predict children's attentional biases toward facial expressions at the age of 10 years. The participants were 79 children from Cohesive, Disengaged, Enmeshed, and Authoritarian family types based on marital and parental relationship trajectories from pregnancy to the age of 12 months. A dotprobe task was used to assess children's emotional attention biases toward threatening (angry) and affiliative (happy) faces at the early (500 ms) and late (1250 ms) stages of processing. Situational priming was applied to activate children's sense of danger or safety. Results showed that children from Cohesive families had an early-stage attentional bias toward threat, whereas children from Enmeshed families had a late-stage bias toward threat. Children from Disengaged families had an early-stage attentional bias toward threat, but showed in addition a late-stage bias away from emotional faces (i.e., both angry and happy). Children from Authoritarian families, in turn, showed a late-stage attentional bias toward emotional faces. Situational priming did not moderate the effects of family system types on children's attentional biases. The findings confirm the influence of early family systems on the attentional biases, suggesting differences in the emotion regulation strategies children have developed to adapt to their family environments.http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijbd International Journal of Behavioral Development regulation. Yet, the long-term effects of early family systems have rarely been studied. This study investigated how family system types predict children's attentional biases toward facial expressions at the age of 10 years. The participants were 79 children from Cohesive, Disengaged, Enmeshed, and Authoritarian family types based on marital and parental relationship trajectories from pregnancy to the age of 12 months. A dot-probe task was used to assess children's emotional attention biases toward threatening (angry) and affiliative (happy) faces at the early (500 ms) and late (1250 ms) stages of processing. Situational priming was applied to activate children's sense of danger or safety. Results showed that children from Cohesive families had an early-stage attentional bias toward threat, whereas children from Enmeshed families had a late-stage bias toward threat. Children from Disengaged families had an early-stage attentional bias toward threat, but showed in addition a late-stage bias away from emotional faces (i.e., both angry and happy). Children from Authoritarian families, in turn, showed a late-stage attentional bias toward emotional faces.Situational priming did not moderate the effects of family system types on children's attentional biases. The findings confirm the influence of early family systems on the attentional biases, suggesting differences in the emotion regulation...

Attentional Bias for Academic Stressors and Classroom Climate Predict Adolescents’ Grades and Socioemotional Functioning

“…These studies have shown that children growing up in rearing environments characterized by chronic violence, maltreatment, and hostility tend to develop overly strong attentional biases to anger cues to adapt their emotional regulation strategies in response to negative interpersonal relationships. More recently, however, scholars have focused their attention on normative developmental contexts and samples (Dodge et al., ; Lindblom et al., ). Although the classroom context plays a prominent role in children's everyday lives, especially in adolescence (Eccles & Roeser, ), its role in influencing students’ attention allocation patterns remains largely unexplored.…”

How do We Live and what is the World We Live in Like? Some Possible Neuroscientific Evaluations on the Anthropology of the Spiritual Life in the Context of the Contemporary Society

“…In general, the family environment influences the cognitive-emotional and psycho-physiological evolution of the child, these influences being felt up to older ages [89]. On the other hand, children's receptivity to spiritual experiences proves their enhanced capacity to develop quality relationships with their own age, but also the willingness to understand the values of their own lives [90], increasing the value of the family environment for the formation of the future adult.…”

The Interplay Among Children's Negative Family Representations, Visual Processing of Negative Emotions, and Externalizing Symptoms

“…On the one hand, documented associations between children's negative internal working models of family relationships and their hostile interpretations of peers in stressful interpersonal contexts provide some indirect support for the schema‐congruent hypothesis (Bascoe, Davies, Sturge‐Apple, & Cummings, ; Granot & Mayseless, ). Moreover, studies have also identified children's exposure to maltreatment, parenting difficulties, and enmeshment in the family as predictors of their heightened attention to negative emotional stimuli (e.g., Gulley, Oppenheimer, & Hankin, ; Lindblom et al., ). Thus, in the context of previous links between adverse family experiences and internal representations, one possibility consistent with the schema‐congruent model is that children's negative family representations increases their negative information processing biases (Crick & Dodge, ).…”

“…On the other hand, research has also generated some piecewise support for the defensive exclusion hypothesis. For example, children's early exposure to family discord and disengagement was associated their diminished processing of negative emotions 9 years later (Lindblom et al., ). Lending preliminary support for the second part of the mediational chain, findings from some cross‐sectional studies have revealed that children's aggression is associated with tendencies to process neutral, rather than hostile, emotional cues (e.g., Horsley et al., ; Schippell, Vasey, Cravens‐Brown, & Bretveld, ).…”

“…Therefore, if discordant representations serve as blueprints for understanding and guarding against interpersonal threats as family process models posit (Johnston et al., ; Thompson, ), then they may be most strongly tied to how children process negative emotional expressions of anger. Studies have identified children's processing of anger as a correlate of their experiences with family difficulties and insecure parent–child relationships (e.g., Gulley et al., ; Lindblom et al., ). However, the focus of these studies on children's processing of a single negative emotion in the context of their exposure to family adversity does not provide a strong basis for developing specific hypotheses on the specificity or generalizability of associations between children's representations of family relationships and attention biases across different negative emotions.…”