Emotion dynamics among preadolescents getting to know each other: Dyadic associations with shyness.

Abstract

The way children express and respond to emotions when they first meet is crucial to friendship initiation. But for highly shy children, these exchanges are particularly challenging. Existing research is based on individual and total frequency measures of emotion that do not reflect the transactional and dynamic nature of emotions in real-life peer interactions. We examined how shyness and dyadic similarity in shyness influence children’s moment-to-moment dyadic emotion sequences with a new peer. Thirty age- and gender-matched dyads (Mage = 10.13 years, 75.8% White) were observed during an unstructured “getting to know you” task. Children’s shyness was assessed through parent- and child-report. Using grid-sequence analysis (Brinberg et al., 2017) we identified three dyadic emotion clusters: Flexible and Shared Positive Affect (60%), Flexible and Shared Neutral Affect (35%), and Stable and Shared Negative Affect (17%). Children in the Stable and Shared Negative Affect cluster were rated higher in shyness relative to children in the Flexible and Shared Positive Affect cluster. Further, children more similar in shyness to their dyadic partner displayed more stable negative and neutral affect expressions than children who differed in shyness from their partner. Together, these findings suggest that shyness is related to less positive and less flexible emotion expressions when meeting a new peer, holding critical implications for friendship initiation among children varying in shyness.

Childhood shyness: An exemplar of the interface of cognition and emotion in human development.

“…Previous work has found that shy children are less likely to initiate conversations with others, tend to speak less in conversations, and show a longer latency to spontaneously speak across social contexts (e.g., Asendorpf & Meier, 1993;MacGowan & Schmidt, 2021a;Schmidt et al, 1997Schmidt et al, , 1999. Social fear can be observed in facial expressions, such as a furrowed brow, gaze aversion, and negative or restricted affect (e.g., Colonnesi et al, 2014;Poole & Schmidt, 2022;Sosa-Hernandez et al, 2023). Fearful responses may also be expressed in body posture.…”

Facial expressions in adolescent–parent interactions and mental health: A proof-of-concept study.

“…The study had important limitations as well. Our analytic sample (28 parent-adolescent dyads from the Chicagoland area) was similar in size to other dyadic interaction studies with adolescents (Sosa-Hernandez et al, 2022), but only afforded sufficient statistical power (.80) to detect large effects (.48) at an alpha level of .05, not medium or small effects, as determined by a sensitivity analysis. Thus, the absence of evidence should not be taken as evidence of absence in the present sample.…”

Language and Mental Health: Measures of Emotion Dynamics from Text as Linguistic Biosocial Markers

“…Emotion dynamics have been shown to correlate with overall well-being, mental health, and psychopathology (the scientific study of mental illness or disorders) (Kuppens and Verduyn, 2017;Houben et al, 2015;Silk et al, 2011;Sperry et al, 2020). Further, studying emotion dynamics allows us to better understand emotions, and has been shown to have ties with academic success (Graziano et al, 2007;Phillips et al, 2002), and social interactions (e.g., shyness) in children (Sosa-Hernandez et al, 2022).…”