Brian E. Vaughn, PhD - US grants

9514563 Vaughn This project is an investigation of individual, relational, and socio-ecological factors supporting children's social competence among peers in a sample of 3-4-year-old children in center-based child care settings. Data gathered with reference to child- caregiver attachment, child temperament, features of the social support network, life events/daily hassles, and attributes of the peer setting itself are used to test a formal model of supports for children's social competence in a sample broadly representative of working and middle class families across a range of ethnic groups in the State of Alabama. Latent variables in the formal model are derived from multiple, independent variables assessed concretely. The model posits both direct and indirect pathways of influence from family relationships to peer social competence. Data gathered will afford opportunities to explore emerging structural and supportive properties of young children's social networks from both mother and child perspectives and explorations of the mothers' networks as influences on children's networks. Also examined will be influences of parent-child attachment and child temperament on children's social competence with peers. Finally, the data will provide opportunities to evaluate effects of life events stress and daily hassles on attributes of the social network and on social competence. Because samples will be drawn across a broad range of socio-demographic parameters, it will also be possible to test influences on social competence from levels of social organization such as "classroom," "neighborhood," and socioeconomic status position. %%% This 3-year project investigates individual, relational, and socio-ecological factors supporting children's social competence among peers in a sample of 3-4-year-old children in center-based child care settings. A sample of families will be recruited in each project year that covers the spectrum of ethnicity an d income levels targeted in the study, in approximate proportion to the population of the State of Alabama. Approximately 25% of the sample in each project year will come from African-American background and approximately 50% of the sample in each project year will have family incomes below the median income level in Alabama. Information gathered in the course of the project will test a formal model that hypothesizes direct and indirect influences of family relationships and child temperament on peer social competence and on attributes of children's social networks. Peer competence is assessed in the context of child care classrooms. Home visits are used to observe parent-child interactions relevant to the quality of their relationships. Social networks and life events stresses are evaluated from interviews with both the parent and child. The data collection plan and analytic strategies afford opportunities to assess the influences of the classroom, the neighborhood, and various socioeconomic indicators on both the social support networks and peer social competence. Results from this study may be used to inform policy concerning optimal timing of group care experiences for preschool children, and will also be relevant to evaluating the relative influences of families, classroom social and physical environments, and informal social support networks on children's sense of well-being. ***

Making and keeping friends is a life-span developmental task that is related to general psychosocial adjustment, to feelings of well-being, and to feelings of 'connectedness' with others from early childhood through old age. Young children failing to make and keep friends are often characterized as lacking social competence, older children/adolescents without friends are frequently characterized in terms of personality deficits and social deviance, and friendless elderly persons are often described as disconnected from the larger social world. Having friends and being a friend are considered generally positive qualities, but recent reviews and descriptive empirical studies have also pointed out that having the 'wrong' friends or participating in 'low quality friendships' can promote sub-optimal developmental trajectories. There is, however, relatively little research evidence documenting the formation and maintenance of friendships varying in terms of "quality," and even less research has focused on potential influences of friendship quality over significant periods of time in stable and changing groups of young children. Very few studies of children's friendships adopt experimental designs to test hypotheses concerning the role of friendship (or friendship quality) as a determinant of developmental outcome. Finally, studies of friendships rarely attempt to coordinate this domain with other relational dimensions salient to children, such as social dominance. This project is proposed as an effort to provide both descriptive and quasi-experimental data concerning antecedents to, correlates of, and outcomes associated with participation in a range of friendships in a large sample of preschool-age children. In a longitudinal study, observations of peer-directed behavior, interviews, and adult ratings (teacher, parent) will be used to characterize individual differences in children's social competence and social dominance with peers. Relevant academic readiness/accomplishment data will also be gathered from parent/teacher ratings and classroom documentation. Antecedent variables will include child temperament/personality, demographic attributes (gender, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, general physical health and attendance records), and teacher/child relationship indicators. Friendship dyads will be determined on the basis of sociometric and/or proximity data (as appropriate for children of different ages). Outcome measures will include assessments from domains of peer social competence, social interactions with friends and acquaintances in natural and laboratory contexts, competition and aggression based social hierarchies, and stability of friendships over time. Descriptive analyses will document the range of friendship quality (along multiple cross-tabulated dimensions) characterizing children from the late toddler period (30-42 months) to kindergarten age (approximately 60-70 months), relations between friendship quality, social competence, and social dominance across this range of ages, and relative influences of adult/child (teacher) versus peer relationships on subsequent measures of social competence, social interactions, and stability of friendships. This study will provide broadly descriptive and prescriptive characterizations of friendships and friendship quality across the preschool period and will explicitly consider friendship and dominance relationships as interactive co-determinants of peer-directed social behavior in the peer groups of young children.

ABSTRACT
Auburn University Children's Research Center Planning Grant
PI: Gregory Pettit
Co-PI: Brian E. Vaughn

This award will support a series of activities to enhance the intellectual, administrative, and social infrastructures at Auburn University . Specific activities relevant to four broad aims will be supported.

The project will build institutional capacity at Department, College, and University levels by (a) initiating and supporting cross-disciplinary inquiries on the nature and development of children's relationships and belief systems; (b) identifying and fostering relationships with nationally and internationally recognized experts in the conduct of this research; (c) establishing relationships that insure the participation of ethnic minority scholars in all aspects of research and that insure the participation of members from ethnic minority communities in research samples; (d) using existing structures for outreach in place at Auburn University to allow for efficient translation of research products into meaningful programs; and (e) laying the groundwork for a Data Center to house data and products from the Research Center and from national and international datasets concerning children's relationships. This Data Center will serve as a resource for Center faculty in terms of consultation and assistance for sampling and analysis and will serve as a portal to the larger community of developmental and learning scientists using the Internet.

The project will assess research needs pertinent to the construction, maintenance, and elaboration of Center identity and focus by (a) fostering cross institution collaborations at national and international levels; (b) developing mechanisms to incorporate training activities for the next generation of developmental and learning scientists; (c) designing an administrative structure to guide the scientific mission of the Center; and (d) developing mission statements for Community and Scientific/Technical Advisory Panels who will serve as external evaluators of Center goals, activities, and products.

The project will support ongoing research programs on interpersonal relationships and social transitions, plan new, large-scale studies of these phenomena, and identify mechanisms to support innovative pilot studies by (a) holding workshops with outside experts to provide training and technical assistance and to identify specific personnel needs for the Center; (b) identifying means/mechanisms to streamline and speed up data coding and sharing of large datasets (e.g., using Internet- 2 protocols to transfer video files) and to use existing facilities more efficiently; and (c) setting priorities for identifying and supporting pilot investigations by Center faculty and affiliates.

The project will establish mechanisms for evaluating Center activities and products by (a) identifying and recruiting a Scientific/Technical Advisory Panel to evaluate the Center's goals, activities, and products in terms of their impact on the developmental and learning sciences and on their capacity to nurture a new generation of developmental and learning scientists from the Human Sciences; and (b) identifying and recruiting a Community Advisory Panel to provide guidance and feedback concerning the practical value of the Center's activities and products, especially with reference to our goal of including ethnic minority participants in every aspect of research

Abstract

Socialization of Preschoolers' Beliefs Across Parent and Peer Relationships

Brian E. Vaughn & Bryan B. Korth


Family relationships are the crucible within which children's social competencies are forged and honed, however, the payoff for the child's social competence is derived from interactions in the peer group. Children well equipped (by virtue of the quality of their family relationships) with interaction skills, beliefs about the desirability of social activities, and convictions that social initiations will lead to positive outcomes tend to become central, accepted members of their peer groups during childhood. Furthermore, these children frequently accumulate social power in the peer group that can be parlayed into preferential access to the physical and social resources available in the group. These facts form the crux of a paradox because parent-child relationships tend to emphasize affiliation, coherence, and nurturance/protection at the expense of competition, conflict, and deception whereas this balance is often reversed in the peer group. The question arises: What is learned in the family that prepares children for the very different social demands imposed by the peer group during early childhood? In this project, we will collect data that can begin to answer this question.

Investigators from Auburn University and the University of Illinois pool their expertise in parent-child and peer relationships for this 4-year longitudinal study. A total sample of 100 families (50 at each site) will be recruited. Insofar as possible, two-parent families will be recruited (a minimum of 50% for the total sample) so that assessments of both mother-child and father-child relationships can be obtained. Assessments of sibling interactions and relationships will be obtained when possible. Because attachment theory proposes the most well articulated characterization of parent-child relationships available in the developmental sciences, assessments of both child and parent will emphasize the 'secure base' aspects of their relationship. Parents will be assessed in terms of their demonstrated ability to serve as a secure base for their child and in terms of the availability of a 'secure base script' in assessments of the adults themselves. Starting in the second project year (as the children turn 3.0-3.5 years of age) assessments will take place also in their peer groups. A standard battery of social competence assessments will be collected and friendship and social dominance status also will be ascertained. Between 3.5- 4.0 years of age, the availability of secure-base scripts in child-parent narratives will be assessed, using tasks developed for this purpose. Both classroom and parent-child assessments will continue in the third project year (as the child turns 4.0 to 4.5 years of age).

Data analyses will test hypotheses concerning the stability of attachments to both parents, the organization of attachment scored from behavioral and narrative protocols, and the specific value of parent-child attachments to forming and maintaining relationships with age peers. Age appropriate measures of cognitive and personality status will also be obtained and tested both as main effects (direct predictors) and as intervening variables in the analyses testing hypotheses posed above.

The expression, understanding, and regulation of affect constitute the domain of emotional competence." This is among the most intensively studied in the recent history of developmental science. To date, most efforts have been devoted to identifying and understanding mechanisms associated with emotion regulation. However, research on emotion regulationhas typically considered only the negative pole of emotion (e.g., anger, fear, sadness, envy) and has yet to address questions about the consequences of positive affect experiences. Recent reviews of literature with adults have shown meaningful associations between experiences of positive emotion (e.g., happiness, joy) and numerous indicators of life success. This project bridges findings on the consequences of emotion/affect expression from developmental science and findings from research on positive psychology with adults. The study employs a multi-cohort longitudinal design, such that with a new cohort of preschool children will begin the study in each consecutive year of funding, and children recruited from a broad range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. The PI will determine the period at which both positive and negative affect expressiveness become stable and the range of emotional competence, behavioral competence, and social competence correlates that can be predicted from positive and negative emotion expressiveness. Observational data on affect expression, social competence, and spontaneous use of math and science curriculum materials during free play will be obtained in classrooms and during dyadic peer interactions. Further, mothers and children will be observed during play, teaching, book-reading, memory reminiscences, and self-control tasks to assess situational constraints on the expression of affect. The data will be used to test hypotheses about the developmental (e.g., intensity of expression will increase over the preschool period), categorical (e.g., the suite of correlates for indicators of positive and negative affect expression will be distinct or overlap only partially), and individual difference in outcomes (e.g., children who characteristically express positive affect will be absent from class less than children who less characteristically express positive affect.

The project's emphasis on the expression of positive and negative affect provide an alternative and novel approach to the study of children's emotion. The project is noteworthy not only for this reason, but also because its sophisticated methodology and developmental design and because it forges a bridge between theories of children's emotional development and the positive psychology perspective that has recently gained prominence in studies of adults. In addition, the longitudinal dataset will allow the PI to test hypotheses concerning causal relations between the experience of positive (and negative) affects and social outcomes (social behavior, social competence, emotional competence) measured in subsequent years. The overarching goal of the project is to provide a comprehensive characterization of the roles played by positive and negative affects in the lives of preschool children. Support for the hypotheses tested could set the stage for preschool curriculum development geared toward promoting the experience and expression of positive affect . Parent education could also benefit from the findings: Support for the project's hypotheses would imply that parents be educated first in their roles as children's first caregivers and then in their roles as teachers who model positive affect and reinforce child expressions of positive affect.

Developmental scientists agree that affects and emotions are elements of virtually every aspect of both personal and interpersonal experiences across the lifespan. This consensus on the centrality of affect in children's lives has led to many studies on the emergence, understanding, and regulation of affect states during the first years of life. These studies have suggested that most of the primary affects are present in the repertoires of infants and toddlers by the end of the second year of life, and children begin to acquire labels for these internal states over the third to fifth years of life. Furthermore, many investigators have assumed that affective states tend to be disruptive, especially when they are experienced at higher intensities, and that the primary task of the developing child is to acquire behavioral and cognitive tactics to "regulate" these states. This assumption is contradicted by a functional explanation of affects, which claims that these internal states are adaptations designed to signal the infant/child about the state of the immediate context as it has relevance for the child and to prepare the child to act in a manner appropriate to the context. The traditional view on the meaning of affect for young children is also at odds with a recent perspective from positive psychology, which suggests that experiences of positive and negative affects per se are critically related to concurrent experience and are predictors of future adaptive behaviors. Finally, most currently available research considers parents as the critical social elements of the child's social context and few data are available for non-parental adults and peers as social contextual features of very young children. Given that 50% or more of infants under 12 months of age are now being cared for by adults other than their parents for significant amounts of their waking day (with the proportion of children in care increasing between 12 and 60 months of age), it seems prudent to examine both developmental trajectories and the correlates/consequences of affect experiences for children in group care. This study was designed to address a range of questions concerning the emergence, change, and developmental outcomes associated with the experience of both positive and negative affective states. To accomplish this broad goal, an observational study of infants and young children, recruited between 3 and 30 months of age, will be mounted, with participants being observed for 30 minutes in each week (up to 80 consecutive weeks of observation). At selected ages, children will be tested using standard developmental assessments to document individual differences in general psychomotor development, temperament, adult-child interactions relevant to understanding intentionality, attachment security, and peer social competence. Growth models will be used to examine the trajectories of change in affect expression and in several developmental domains. Associations between affect and various developmental outcomes will be assessed using both correlation and structural equation model techniques.

Results of this research will document the developmental pathways of affect experience from 3-6 months through 36-42 months of age (examining multiple cohorts, each recruited at different age levels). This is the first such study involving children in extensive non-parental childcare experience from early in the first year. The study will examine central assumptions from positive psychology, namely that the experience of positive emotions constitutes the very young child's first level of awareness about the support for subjective well-being available in the immediate social context (and conversely, that the experience of negative affects signals contexts that undermine well-being). The research will estimate the overall level and the nature of changes in affect experience over time. The design allows for testing of critical assumptions from theories of attachment and temperament regarding the social vs. innate influences on tendencies to experience and express different categories of affect. Finally, this study is designed to test the nature of relations between affect experience and peer social competence. Results of this study will be useful for design and implementation of curricula for infants and preschool children and will have implications for caregiver preparation.

Sleep is a critical element of adaptive functioning across the whole human life cycle, and is crucial during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. The fundamental importance of sleep, as both as state and a process, for development has been recognized by developmental scientists for over 20 years and studies have linked quantitative (e.g., total amount of sleep per night) and qualitative (e.g., sleep efficiency--time in bed that the person is actually asleep) sleep parameters to a broad range of health-relevant outcomes in samples of children. Researchers also have identified many biological and social factors that influence both sleep quantity and quality, however, the bulk of research with children has focused on infancy, school-age children, and adolescents; with relatively little research attention devoted to the impact of sleep during early childhood (nominally 2.5-6 years). Moreover, most studies covering the early childhood period relied on subjective reports from sleep diaries or questionnaires completed by parents and examined problems associated with medical conditions or with sleep deficits. Finally, most of these studies recruited families in which children were cared for at home by a parent. This study of up to 270 children (90 in each of 3 consecutive years), recruited between the ages of 2.5 and 4.5 years of age and followed up to two years after initial enrollment, starts from the premise that sleep parameters are continua ranging from maladaptive to optimal, with most children falling in a mid-range that is adequate for normal growth and functioning, rather than from the premise that sleep parameters are either "disordered" or not. The investigators for this project will recruit the sample from a high-quality early education center in a large metropolitan area from the Southeastern USA. Selecting such a sample allows them to consider both the positive growth promoting benefits of sleep as well as the constraints on development and adaptation imposed by less adequate sleep. The sample also allows generalization of prior research on home-reared children to the most common child-care setting now being used in the USA (group care). The researchers will also measure sleep objectively by using activity monitors worn by the children over a week's time, which makes it possible to examine the trajectories of nighttime and naptime sleep in greater detail than is possible from parent reports; although the project will retain the parent diary method so as to provide contextual information (e.g., any illnesses the child suffered while sleep was monitored; medications taken, etc.) to supplement the sleep measures from activity monitoring. The investigators also will conduct a comprehensive assessment of child adaptation in their homes and early education center classrooms, including the domains of social, emotional, cognitive, and academic functioning. These assessments involve extensive direct observations of child behavior at home and in the classroom, standard tests of receptive vocabulary and age-appropriate academic achievement, laboratory tasks designed to assess self-regulation, emotion knowledge, executive functioning, and parent/child and teacher/child relationships.

The study will provide fundamental information about the developmental course of sleep (quantity and quality) over early childhood and the environmental factors that constrain and/or promote adequate and optimal sleep. Because children will be observed repeatedly over the course of the study, the researchers will also be able to examine the temporal/causal influences of parent/child relationships on sleep (and vice versa), as well as the relative influences of both sleep and adult/child relationships on the quality of social/emotional and cognitive/academic functioning assessed in the classroom. A fourth valuable contribution of the study arises as a consequence of the sample itself. The early education program collaborating with the study serves a multi-ethnic but predominantly middle-class population (about 30% ethnic minority status families enrolling children) but also serves children from low-resource families (~10% of total enrollment). This distribution of children will permit testing hypotheses concerning health disparities between minority ethnic status and/or more economically challenged groups (compared to majority ethnic status and/or middle SES groups) with regard to sleep and its consequences. In addition to these fundamental contributions to the science of sleep, this study will likely have broad implications for childcare policy, curriculum development for young children, teacher training, and parent education.

This project explores how children's social competence with other children contributes to the development of their "executive function" skills, that is, their capacities to make plans and decisions about actions, thoughts, and emotions. These skills affect how children interact with the social and physical contexts they encounter in their peer groups. Ultimately, such skills support children's readiness for formal schooling and underlie mastery of the academic content presented in school. This study uses direct observations, interviews, experimental tasks, and standardized tests to measure both social competence and executive function in children. Adults' ratings for these domains are also employed.

The central hypotheses are: 1) social competence and executive functions are significantly related across academic years; 2) social competence is a significant cause of age-related changes in executive functions; 3) individual differences in children's social engagement at age 3 years will predict the degree of positive change in executive functions at age 4 years; and 4) social competence and executive function predict school readiness and academic achievement. Support for these hypotheses in statistical analyses will demonstrate that developmental domains are integrated during early childhood and that social processes leading to social competence promote positive change in children's executive function capacity. This would suggest modifications to current Pre-K curricula, which would take advantage of the impacts that peer interactions have on growth of executive functions and on children's readiness for formal schooling and achievement in school contexts.