Development of inhibited children's coping with unfamiliarity

Abstract

In a longitudinal study, 87 children were observed in dyadic free-play sessions with unfamiliar peers at 4, 6, and 8 years of age and were judged by their parents for inhibition. Correlational analyses showed that observed inhibited behavior as well as parental judgments of inhibition became increasingly associated with solitary-passive activity and lost an initial negative correlation with parallel play. Extreme group analyses of the time structure of the behavior of continuously inhibited and control children indicated that with increasing age, many inhibited children spend longer periods in solitary-passive activity, whereas many controls spend longer periods in social behavior. These findings suggest that dispositional inhibition toward strangers becomes increasingly associated with unsociable behavior, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the dispositions of inhibition and unsociability at the empirical level.