Tedra A. Walden - US grants

Infants and young children are active information processors and they seek information that they can use in deciding how to behave in a variety of situations, particularly those that are novel or stressful. One source of information to which even young children learn to pay attention is the behavior of other people, particularly emotional reactions to events as they occur. That is, other people's reactions are an important source of information about hazards and opportunities in the world. By the end of the first year of life infants notice and base their behavior partly on reactions communicated to them by other people. This series of studies will investigate processes of social referencing and their development in infants and young children. Social referencing refers to the use of another's interpretation of an event as basis for forming one's own interpretation of the meaning of that event and as a basis for subsequent responses to that event. Specifically, this program of research will follow-up findings obtained in my previous work which indicated that some children did not show behavior regulation in response to parental affective communications; and that this effect was associated with parental contingency, an issue in the timing of information. The effect of contingency is proposed to operate via infant attention, with noncontingent messages occurring in nonoptimal state of attention with regard to linking the message with the intended referent. Projects will 1) investigate the development of infant attention and link social referencing outcomes with messages received in optimal and nonoptimal state of attention, 2) experimentally manipulate the occurrence of parental messages to occur in optimal and nonoptimal state of attention, and 3) investigate the contribution of infant affect prior to and during receipt of parental messages to social referencing outcomes. These projects will contribute to our understanding of processes that underlie social referencing and facilitate or inhibit the transmission of social influence the transmission of social influence from one person to another. Thus, they will add to our knowledge of how this significant form of social information is communicated to and used by very young children in dealing with events.

9410573 Walden ABSTRACT Past research has revealed that infants are likely to reference the emotional and instrumental behavior of caregivers and other significant persons and to be influenced by their behavior. This phenomenon of social referencing will be examined in two overlapping short-term longitudinal studies which will follow the individual development of social referencing during the period of initial establishment during infancy (cohort 1) and during the subsequent development later in the toddler period (cohort 2); the studies overlap at the 12- and 18-month assessments. Each study includes four occasions of observation and at each occasion, each parent-child dyad is exposed to at least three different stimulus events that permit social referencing to occur. This design allows for examination of individual consistency in behavior across stimulus events at a single point in development and stability in behavior across development. In order to link the development of social referencing to other related developmental milestones, measures of physical development, communication development, and social development are obtained and links with social referencing are examined. People who are faced with situations of uncertainty, in which they don't know what to do, are influenced by other persons' interpretations of the situation. Recent research has provided evidence that even young infants, when confronted with uncertainty, engage in social referencing of others. When infants encounter situations that seem potentially threatening, they often check their parents' emotional reactions before deciding how to behave. The process of using the emotional expressions of other people to make sense of ambiguous situations is called social referencing. This important strategy for interpreting new or mystifying events and figuring out how to respond to them is an important process by which children and adults are socialized int o thinking and feeling in ways that are consensually accepted in a society. This project focuses on the very early development of social referencing in infants. Two overlapping short-term longitudinal studies will follow the individual development of social referencing during the period of initial establishment during infancy and during the subsequent development later in the toddler period. The research design allows for examination of individual consistency in social referencing behavior across stimulus events at a single point in development and stability in behavior across development. In order to link the development of social referencing to other related developmental milestones, its associations with physical development, communication development, and social development will be examined. This study will provide information about the early development of one important process of social influence by which young children are socialized to adopt the behavior and the affect of those in their environment. ***

Renewal of funding is requested to train research scientists in the behavioral aspects of mental retardation and other developmental disabilities. The proposed program represents a continuation of the mental retardation research training program begun at Peabody College in 1954. The basic goal of this program is to train sophisticated, broadly based, skillful behavioral scientists committed to research on mental retardation and other developmental disabilities. The behavioral manifestation of developmental disabilities, the complex multifaceted interactions between behavioral and biomedical variables, and the increasing prevalence of contributing risk factors, strongly support the need for sophisticated research training at the pre- and postdoctoral level. The training program will emphasize the complex, interdisciplinary nature of contemporary behavioral research in mental retardation and other developmental disabilities in several ways: (a) trainees will come from the Departments of Psychology and Human Development and Special Education; (b) training faculty will include research scientists studying a wide range of problems; (c) trainees will be immersed in ongoing, collaborative research; (d) through required coursework, a continuing Proseminar, and a diverse colloquium program, trainees will receive a comprehensive introduction to contemporary behavioral research as well as relevant research in the neuro and biomedical sciences. Funds are requested for 6 predoctoral and 2 postdoctoral trainees. The program builds on the present training program, existing resources and programs within the Vanderbilt University community, and the rich ongoing tradition of behavioral research in mental retardation of the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant):Renewal of funding is requested to train research scientists in the behavioral aspects of mental retardation and other developmental disabilities. The proposed program represents a continuation of the mental retardation research training program begun at Peabody College in 1954. The basic goal of this program is to train sophisticated, broadly based, skillful behavioral scientists committed to research on mental retardation and other developmental disabilities. The behavioral manifestation of developmental disabilities, the complex multifaceted interactions between behavioral and biomedical variables, and the increasing prevalence of contributing risk factors, strongly support the need for sophisticated research training at the pre- and postdoctoral level. The training program will emphasize the complex, interdisciplinary nature of contemporary behavioral research in mental retardation and other developmental disabilities in several ways: (a) trainees will come from the Departments of Psychology and Human Development, Special Education and Speech and Hearing Sciences; (b) training faculty will include research scientists studying a wide range of problems; (c) trainees will be immersed in ongoing, collaborative research; (d) through required coursework, a continuing Proseminar, and a diverse colloquium program, trainees will receive a comprehensive introduction to contemporary behavioral research as well as relevant research in the neuro and biomedical sciences. Funds are requested for 6 predoctoral and 2 postdoctoral trainees. The program builds on the present training program, existing resources and programs within the Vanderbilt University community, and the rich ongoing tradition of behavioral research in mental retardation of the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Stuttering has a lifetime incidence (i.e., percentage of adults who ever stuttered) of nearly 5% and significantly impacts the academic, emotional, social, and vocational achievements, development and potential of individuals who stutter (see Bloodstein & Bernstein Ratner, 2008). However, seventy-eighty percent of those affected discontinue (e.g., Yairi & Ambrose, 1999) without significant formal treatment (i.e., unassisted recovery). For the remaining children (i.e., approximately 1% of children who continue to stutter after 6 years of age), the negative impact of stuttering on their lives and daily activities can be significant. There is a strong need, therefore, to determine variables that may initiate/cause, exacerbate or perpetuate stuttering to develop more efficient, effective empirically-based approaches to diagnosis and treatment. Further, as Yairi (1993) noted, Because advanced stuttering is markedly different from the incipient form...attempts to infer its [stuttering's] etiology and nature or to prescribe treatment for children who stutter based on models derived from adult stutterers are indefensible (Conture, 1991; Yairi, 1990; p.198). Thus, it is imperative to examine variables in the period during which stuttering typically begins. To address this imperative, we propose a longitudinal study of preschool-age children who stutter, with emphasis on how emotion and speech-language processes contribute to developmental stuttering. Building on Monroe and Simons' (1991) etiological notion of diathesis-stress interactions, the applicants' conceptual model proposes that dual diatheses (i.e., emotional and/or speech-language vulnerabilities) are activated by environmental stressors (e.g., changes, differences, novelty in structure and/or changes in need to spontaneously generate speech-language) to cause stuttering. This model assumes that a finite number of combinations of emotional and/or speech-language variables contribute to meaningful differences between children who do and do not stutter, as well as between children who recover and those who persist. The proposed project builds on our preliminary findings and theoretical model, longitudinally, to relate emotional and speech-language to developmental stuttering, using multiple methods (i.e., observational, standardized testing, parent-report, and psychophysiology) that assess our major constructs of emotion and speech-language. This interdisciplinary investigation - involving collaboration between developmental psychology and speech-language pathology - should help determine whether children at the onset of stuttering differ from their normally fluent peers on emotion and speech-language variables and whether these differences, over time, predict which children will and will not recover. Findings from this longitudinal investigation will help ground the study of stuttering within the broader context of emotional and speech- language development and help focus future research on issues that inform diagnostic and treatment protocols for childhood stuttering.

Stuttering has a lifetime incidence (adults who have ever stuttered) of nearly 5% and impacts academic, emotional, social, and vocational achievements of those who stutter (Bloodstein & Bernstein-Ratner, 2008). About 78% discontinue with or without formal treatment (e.g., Yairi & Ambrose, 1999), but for the remaining 1% with this speech-language disorder the negative impact of stuttering can be life-long. There is a critical need to determine variables that initiate, exacerbate or perpetuate stuttering in children close to initial onset to accurately diagnose and effectively treat it in its earliest stages. There is a gap in knowledge about how emotion and variables related to emotion such as attention regulation, impacts stuttering and persistence. To address the gap, this proposal investigates emotional reactivity and regulation and their attentional correlates to determine if they differ in preschool children who do and do not stutter and predict who will recover. The hypothesis, based on published and submitted studies, is that emotional and attentional processes distinguish children who stutter from those who do not and impact stuttering persistence. Three specific aims are: (1) Identify stable temperamental proclivities for emotional reactivity and emotion regulation associated with stuttering, as well as variable situational influences on emotion, during experimental tasks, (2) Determine the association of stuttering with attention and attention regulation (a prominent strategy of emotion regulation), under emotional and unemotional conditions, and (3) Determine if emotion and attention predict persistence. Three related studies are: (1) A cross-sectional study of temperament and children's emotional responses to situational stressors in varied laboratory tasks, (2) A study of children's attention during tasks that challenge attention under emotional and unemotional conditions, (3) A longitudinal study of how emotion and attention regulation combine to influence stuttering and predict which children who stutter will recover or persist. Multiple methods assess emotion and attention (observational, experimental, parent-report, and psychophysiology). This interdisciplinary investigation between developmental psychologists and speech- language pathologists will help determine whether preschool children who stutter differ from fluent peers on emotion and attention and whether these differences predict which children recover. Findings will ground the study of stuttering within a broader context of emotional and attention development and help focus current and future research on issues that inform diagnosis and treatment for childhood stuttering.