The Emotional Processing Characteristics Of Different Environmental Sensitivity 8-12 Years Old Children And Its Effect On Internalizing Problems

The temperament trait of environmental sensitivity is a kind of temperamental characteristic which reflects the individual’s sensitivity to environmental impact.Many scholars discussed the impact of environment and temperament on individual’s development.Firstly,using the revised HSC-C questionnaire,the present study investigated the developmental characteristics of 8-12 years old children.Then we not only explored the development of emotion regulation strategy but also the implicit emotion regulation of temperamental sensitivity children.A great deal of researches indicated that attention bias to negative information was associated with children’s problem behavior and poor emotion regulation,while attention bias to positive information was associated with better emotion regulation.From the perspective of the extended emotion regulation model and the affect-biased attention model,individuals’ personality would interact with their attention pattern.Further,both of them would have influence on their internalizing problems.The present study investigated the relationship among environmental sensitivity,affect-biased attention,emotion regulation and internalizing problems in 8-12 years old children.These findings would extend our understanding of the developmental links between person and environment.Study 1:The revised of HSC-C questionnaire for 8-12 years old children.Based on review about the previous studies on environmental sensitivity.we revised Highly Sensitive Child(HSC)questionnaire for 8-12 years old children including three factors:Ease of Excitation(EOE);Aesthetic Sensitivity(AES)and Low Sensory Threshold(LST).We investigated reliability and validity and preliminary application of an investigation of the relationship between children’s environmental sensitivity and relevant temperament dimensions.The developmental characteristics of environmental sensitivity in children aged 8-12.In order to explored the developmental characteristics of environmental sensitivity in children,we collected their information from 860 children aged 8-12 via HSC-C.In addition,this study also examined the individual differences in children’s cognitive emotion regulation strategies.Study 2:Affect-biased attention of 8-12 years old children with different environmental sensitivity.This study included two experiments.Firstly,we used the visual search paradigm to examine the affect-biased attention to non-social emotional pictures in different environmental sensitivity children.Then,we used dot-probe paradigm to assess affect-biased attention to social emotional pictures in a sample of 60 children aged 8-12.Study 3:The neural mechanism of implicit emotion regulation in environmental sensitivity children aged 8-12.The present study examined the relationship between environmental sensitivity and emotion regulation.ERP was continuously recorded during an emotion Go/NOGO task.Study 4:Relationship between affect-biased attention and emotion regulation of 8-12 years old children with different temperamental sensitivity.Based on previous studies,we examined the relationship between affect-biased attention and emotion regulation among environmental sensitivity primary school students.Furthermore,the study also investigated the effects of family environment in the relationship between affect-biased attention and emotion regulation.The main conclusions were as follows:1.The reliability and validity of the HSC-C questionnaire were satisfactory,and the questionnaire had gender and age equivalence.Thus the HSC-C can be used to measure the environmental sensitivity of children aged 8-12.The environmental sensitivity of Chinese children was relatively stable.Specifically,it stayed stable from 8 to 10.But when children go into the period of preadolescence,their environmental sensitivity gets stronger.In another word,children aged 10-12 have higher scores of environmental sensitivity than those aged 8-10.2.The time differences of first fixation for the target and disturbing emotional pictures between the two groups of children(high or low environmental sensitivity)were not significant,the duration of first fixation was significantly different,children who have high environmental sensitivity had attention bias for the positive and negative emotional pictures.Comparing to children with low environmental sensitivity,those with high environmental sensitivity had stronger attention bias for negative emotional pictures and stronger maintaining bias of attention for positive and negative emotional pictures.3.Children’s environmental sensitivity was positively correlated with both adaptive and maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation;each dimension of the environmental sensitivity was correlated with strategies of cognitive emotion regulation;the dimension of EOE had a medium correlation with maladaptive strategies and the dimensions of AES had a medium correlation with adaptive strategies;the two strategies and LST were partially correlated;the general factors of environmental sensitivity based on bifactor model could positively predict adaptive strategies;the specific factors EOE could positively predict maladaptive strategies and AES could positively predict adaptive strategies.Compared with children who have low environmental sensitivity,those who have high environmental sensitivity have stronger automatic attention control and automatic response inhibition.4.The positive maintaining bias of attention moderated the relationship between children’s environmental sensitivity and maladaptive strategies.The maladaptive strategies had mediation effect for the relationship between children’s environmental sensitivity and variables of mental health.There was a mediated moderation model for environmental sensitivity,cognitive emotion regulation,emotional attention maintenance and the variables of mental health.