Social Affiliation and Attention to Angry Faces in Children: Evidence for the Contributing Role of Parental Sensory...

Low social affiliation has been described as a phenotypic marker of antisocial behaviors by disrupting children's initiation and enjoyment of positive physical and emotional connections with others. Laboratory studies have shown that, in early childhood, low social affiliation rates are preceded by lower attention to faces. In addition, while low social affiliation has also been associated with behavioral outcomes when accounting for parenting influences, the effect that parental environmental sensitivity may have on contributing to the link between emotional processing early in life and later behavioral manifestations associated with antisocial behavior is currently unknown.

The present eye-tracking study aims to delineate the potential contribution of parental Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) to the link between children's rates of social affiliation and their attentional patterns in response to emotional faces.

For the needs of this study, children performed a lab-based, computerized facial processing task (N = 153; Mage = 9.97; SDage = 1.28; 48.8% females). In addition, one of the children's parents completed questionnaires for their children's and their own behavior (N = 153; Mage = 40.9; SDage = 4.85; 87.7% females).

The results underline the contributing role of parental SPS on the associations between social affiliation and visual scanning when viewing angry emotional faces. In particular, children with low rates of social affiliation spent significantly more time fixating on the mouth regions of angry faces only when their parents had higher SPS.

This study unveils the possibility for the contextual influence of parental environmental sensitivity on the early emotional processing mechanisms in children with low rates of social affiliation. These findings suggest that interventions aimed at improving emotional processing in children at risk for antisocial behavior should consider parental SPS as a contributing factor. Tailoring parent-based interventions to address how highly sensitive parents interpret and respond to emotional challenges may reduce children's attentional biases to threats and support healthier socioemotional development.