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. 2024 Dec;52(12):1887-1899.
doi: 10.1007/s10802-024-01246-1. Epub 2024 Sep 17.

Temperamental Shyness, Peer Competence, and Loneliness in Middle Childhood: The Role of Positive Emotion

Qiong Wu  1 , Karina Jalapa  2 , Chorong Lee  2 , Xinyun Kaikai Zhang  2 , Mickey Langlais  3
Affiliations

Temperamental Shyness, Peer Competence, and Loneliness in Middle Childhood: The Role of Positive Emotion

Qiong Wu et al. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol. 2024 Dec.

Abstract

Guided by the conceptual frameworks of social withdrawal (Rubin, K. H., & Chronis-Tuscano, A. (2021). Perspectives on social withdrawal in childhood: Past, present, and prospects. Child Development Perspectives, 15(3), 160-167.) and emotion socialization (Eisenberg, N., Cumberland, A., & Spinrad, T. L. (1998). Parental socialization of emotion. Psychological Inquiry, 9, 241-273.; Morris, (A) S., Criss, M. M., Silk, J. S., & Houltberg, (B) J. (2017). The impact of parenting on emotion regulation during childhood and adolescence. Child Development Perspectives, 11(4), 233-238.), the current study examined multifaceted relations among temperamental shyness, peer competence, and loneliness and focused on the role of socializing and expressing positive emotion in middle childhood. Participants included 1,364 families, among whom mothers reported children's temperament when children were 4.5 years old. Mothers and alternative caregivers (usually fathers) independently rated family expressiveness when children were 8-9 years old. Mothers rated their children's peer competence, and children's positive affect with peers were observed when children were ages 8-9 and 10-11. Children self-rated their loneliness levels at ages 10-11. A path model revealed a moderated mediation effect, such that family positive expressiveness moderated the sequential mediation pathway from child temperamental shyness through child peer competence at ages 8-9 and positive affect with peers at ages 10-11 to loneliness at ages 10-11. This sequential mediation was significant only under low but not high levels of family positive expressiveness. Findings support the importance of socializing positive emotion in the context of temperamental shyness and have implications for family-based intervention strategies aimed at children exhibiting high temperamental shyness.

Keywords: Emotion socialization; Loneliness; Peer competence; Positive emotion; Temperamental shyness.

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Conflict of interest statement

Compliance with Ethical Standards. Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Ethical approval: IRB approvals were obtained for the study procedures (Florida State University, STUDY00000739, “Maternal depression and children’s emotional development”). This study was not preregistered. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed Consent: Parents provided consent and parental permission prior to data collection, when children were one month old. Research Involving Human Participants: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The conceptual and empirical models. (a) The conceptual model. (b) The path model with unstandardized coefficients. Statistically significant paths are in black, and insignificant paths are in grey
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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