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Do you see what I mean?: Using mobile eye tracking to capture parent–child dynamics in the context of anxiety risk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2021

Leigha A. MacNeill Open the ORCID record for Leigha A. MacNeill [Opens in a new window] ,
Xiaoxue Fu ,
Kristin A. Buss Open the ORCID record for Kristin A. Buss [Opens in a new window]  and
Koraly Pérez-Edgar
Leigha A. MacNeill*
Affiliation:
Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
Xiaoxue Fu
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA Institute for Mind and Brain, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
Kristin A. Buss
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
Koraly Pérez-Edgar
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
*
Author for Correspondence: Leigha A. MacNeill, Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 100 E. Franklin St., Suite 200, Chapel Hill, NC27599, USA; E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Temperamental behavioral inhibition (BI) is a robust endophenotype for anxiety characterized by increased sensitivity to novelty. Controlling parenting can reinforce children's wariness by rewarding signs of distress. Fine-grained, dynamic measures are needed to better understand both how children perceive their parent's behaviors and the mechanisms supporting evident relations between parenting and socioemotional functioning. The current study examined dyadic attractor patterns (average mean durations) with state space grids, using children's attention patterns (captured via mobile eye tracking) and parental behavior (positive reinforcement, teaching, directives, intrusion), as functions of child BI and parent anxiety. Forty 5- to 7-year-old children and their primary caregivers completed a set of challenging puzzles, during which the child wore a head-mounted eye tracker. Child BI was positively correlated with proportion of parent's time spent teaching. Child age was negatively related, and parent anxiety level was positively related, to parent-focused/controlling parenting attractor strength. There was a significant interaction between parent anxiety level and child age predicting parent-focused/controlling parenting attractor strength. This study is a first step to examining the co-occurrence of parenting behavior and child attention in the context of child BI and parental anxiety levels.

Keywords

anxietybehavioral inhibitionmobile eye trackingparentingstate space grids
Type
Regular Article
Information
Development and Psychopathology , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 997 - 1012
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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