Individual differences in the emergence of social competency: Social ecological and psychobiological influences

This investigation explored a multidimensional model of coacting influences on children's development with particular emphasis given to exploring relationships between individual characteristics, physiological functioning, socioemotional affiliative processes and children's emerging social competencies. This study explored four main hypotheses which included an examination of the links between behavioral inhibition and physiological functioning; an examination of the potential moderating effect of children's attachment relationships on the relationship between inhibition and physiology, an exploration of a multideterminant model of children's emerging social competencies, and an attempt to support a typological model of children's social competence. The major findings from this investigation were that (1) in a unselected, normally developing group of preschoolers, inhibited response patterns across multiple assessment episodes is related to children's underlying physiological patterns of heart rate variability during a low-attentive heart rate assessment; (2) Attachment security was found to moderate the relationship between inhibitory response patterns and heart rate indices; (3) Limited support for a multideterminant model of children's social competency. Children's concurrent experiences in play group situations was found to be the best predictor of children's social-participatory behaviors in an unfamiliar play setting; And (4) Membership into one of four possible social-cognitive play types was accurately predicted by a combination of a priori selected independent variables, however, the direction of influence among the predictors was not found to support a priori assumptions regarding group classification. These findings are further evaluated and suggestions are offered for future direction to extend the current outcomes from this investigation.