Predicting children's internalizing symptoms across development from early emotional reactivity |
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| Authors: | Lindsay N Gabel Ola Mohamed Ali Yuliya Kotelnikova Paul F Tremblay Kasey J Stanton C Emily Durbin Elizabeth P Hayden |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Psychology, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada;2. Faculty of Education, School & Clinical Child Psychology Program, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada;3. Department of Psychology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, USA;4. Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA |
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| Abstract: | Current methods of assessing children's emotional reactivity fail to capture individual differences in emotion across contexts that may be meaningfully related to youth psychopathology. We therefore explored the utility of modeling variability in young children's positive and negative emotion across emotionally evocative laboratory tasks to predict later adjustment. At age 3, 409 children completed a battery of laboratory tasks eliciting either positive or negative affect. We used latent difference score (LDS) modeling to predict children's caregiver-reported internalizing symptoms across ages 3, 5, 8, and 11 from variability in their observer-rated positive and negative emotion across laboratory tasks. We found that sex moderated the association between both average and variability measures of children's negative emotion at age 3 and trajectories of their anxious-depressive symptoms across childhood. Measures of emotion variability predicted children's internalizing symptoms above and beyond measures of average emotion. Variability indices also provided unique information about the trajectories of children's symptoms. We discuss implications for the utility of LDS modeling in assessing children's emotional reactivity. |
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| Keywords: | assessment childhood developmental psychopathology emotional reactivity emotional variability latent difference score modeling |
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