Identifying the Susceptibility Mechanisms Accounting for the Moderating Role of Children's Environmental Sensitivity to Family Interaction Dynamics

About This Grant

Differential susceptibility theory proposes that children’s temperament confers greater susceptibility to both supportive and harsh family environments. Subsequent studies have provided compelling support for the designation of children’s environmental sensitivity (ES) as a top differential susceptibility factor. ES precisely captures differential susceptibility in its identification of behaviors that reflect a low threshold of environmental stimulation and responses that are finely tuned to varying environmental properties within and across contexts. Relative to the weak, inconsistent results of temperamental characteristics, the moderating role of ES has been consistently expressed in a susceptibility manner by both potentiating children’s risk for psychological problems in harsh family conditions and magnifying their better mental health outcomes in supportive family contexts. However, little is known about how ES confers child susceptibility across these varying socialization conditions. To address this significant gap, the present application is designed to break new ground by providing the first empirical delineation of the mechanisms that underpin the susceptibility of children who are high in ES. Guided by a synthesis of temperament and resource allocation theory, the aims of the proposal are designed to examine whether the moderating role of children’s ES in associations among family functioning and their psychological adjustment (i.e., internalizing and externalizing symptoms; social adjustment) is mediated by three classes of susceptibility mechanisms: (1) stress responses to family adversity across behavioral and representational dimensions; (2) emotion processing characteristics of preferential attention to specific types of emotion cues, emotion recognition, and emotion situation knowledge; and (3) exploratory approaches that vary in prioritization of securing short-term or long-term resources. Building on a strong foundation of theory and promising preliminary findings, this application will examine plasticity mechanisms underpinning ES by following a sample of 265 4-year-old children and their parents over three annual measurement occasions. The multi-method, multi-informant measurement battery, longitudinal design, and powerful quantitative analyses are designed to generate rigorous tests of hypotheses on the mechanisms mediating the moderating effects of ES in prospective associations among family functioning and children’s psychological sequelae. High methodological innovation and rigor are evident in the use of the latest, sophisticated measures of ES (e.g., observational and Q-sort assessments) and the proposed mediators (e.g., eye tracking measures of emotion-biased attention; novel and theoretically informed assessments of stress reactivity, computational modeling of exploratory strategies). Thus, by offering the first systematic tests of the child plasticity mechanisms underpinning ES, our application is poised to provide valuable theoretical and scientific knowledge on how children express differential susceptibility over time and translational guidance on modifiable mechanisms for optimizing the full psychological potential of susceptible children.