what can early social cognition teach us about the development of social anxieties
TRANSCRIPT
Cogniţie, Creier, Comportament / Cognition, Brain, Behavior Copyright © 2006 Romanian Association for Cognitive Science. All rights reserved. ISSN: 1224-8398 Volume X, No. 4 (December), 543-557
WHAT CAN EARLY SOCIAL COGNITION TEACH US ABOUT THE DEVELOPMENT OF
SOCIAL ANXIETIES? Elena GEANGU*1,2, Vincent M. REID*3,4
1Romanian Academy of Science, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 2Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
3Neurocognition and Development Group, Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Leipzig & Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences,
Leipzig, Germany; 4Department of Psychology, University of Durham, Durham, England
ABSTRACT Social anxiety is one of the most prevalent psychological disorders that affects up to 13% of individuals in Western society across their lifetime. The debut of the disorder can be recorded as early as the age of 2.5 years. The tendency for social anxiety appears to be stable across the lifespan, and it seems to be stable across life. One of the main impairments is a marked and persistent fear of one or more social and performance situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or to possible scrutiny by others. This is usually associated with a distorted processing of social information and social situations. We find that remarkably, links have not been made between early social-cognitive development and later anxiety disorders in preschool children. Research with adults provides evidence for social information processing impairments in those with social anxiety. The bulk of evidence comes from face perception. It is shown that the impairments manifest both in the exacerbation (e.g. for harsh and angry expressions) and lack (e.g. avoidance of foveal fixation) of face processing for emotional expressivity. The paper will argue on how early social information processing (e.g. contingency detection, face and eye gaze perception) could be used to explain and understand the early onset of social anxieties. KEYWORDS: social cognition, social anxiety, face processing
* Corresponding authors: E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
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OVERVIEW
Broadly defined, social cognition among humans refers to the ability to understand other people. It involves the ability to monitor, predict and understand others’ behaviours and actions. Research on early social cognition has advanced rapidly over the past years. It is now known that in the first year, infants systematically engage in joint attention (Striano, Reid, & Hoehl, 2006), discriminate intentional from accidental actions (Behne, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2005), and interpret observed actions as rational or irrational (Gergely, Nádasdy, Csibra, & Bíró, 1995). As the definition of social cognition is so very broad, we will focus on four key topics within early social cognition research that have special relevance for understanding the ontogeny and nature of social anxiety. The key topics are (1) Early social interactions; (2) Contingency detection; (3) Face and gaze processing and (4) Detecting goals and intentions of others. After providing an overview of important aspects of early social-cognitive development, we will overview the nature of anxiety and anxiety disorders in preschool children, and we will proceed to outline what we see to be key relationships between the ontogeny and manifestation of anxiety disorders and fundamental components of social cognition in early development.
Motivation for the production of this paper is due in part to new models outlining how social anxiety may function (e.g. Rapee & Spence, 2004; Clark, 2001; Hirsch, Clark, & Mathews, 2006). These models in our view may benefit from relations between social anxiety and the assessment of early social-cognitive processing. It is, however, of note that we focus only on aspects of social cognition. We fully acknowledge that there must be relations between social anxiety and other factors, such as temperamental characteristics of the individual. These other aspects are not discussed in this paper due to space constraints, despite undoubtedly having a key part to play in the development of anxiety disorders.
KEY COMPONENTS IN EARLY SOCIAL COGNITION
Early social interactions One component of social cognition that has been widely investigated in the
developmental sciences is infant sensitivity to triadic attention. This is when an infant attends to a location or object while continuously referencing this object or location to an interaction with another person. It has been found that triadic attention is necessary for a wide range of human social cognitive skills, such as social referencing (Moses, Baldwin, Rosicky, & Tidball, 2001), and language learning (Morales, Mundy, & Rojas, 1998; Baldwin, 1993). It has also been conjectured that triadic attention is a necessary component of many human social cognitive skills – including some that may be unique to humans, such as language.
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Key components of triadic attention develop very early in the first postnatal year. For example, by 4 months, information extracted from a visual scene with respect to objects that others orient toward is different than that when a person does not look towards an object. This has been demonstrated at the behavioural and neural level (Reid, Striano, Kaufman, & Johnson, 2004; Reid & Striano, 2005).
The ontogeny of infants’ sensitivity to triadic attention is an important question not only in its own right for understanding social relations in early infancy, but also for what these abilities may foster in terms of social learning and later development. Prior studies assessing infants’ sensitivity have focused on gaze following or dyadic interaction paradigms (e.g., Hains & Muir, 1996; Striano, 2004). One exception is a recent study comparing 3- 6-, and 9-month-old infants’ sensitivity to triadic attention (Striano & Stahl, 2005). The authors documented that even by 3-months of age infants are sensitive to various degrees of others’ triadic attention. For example, infants looked and smiled reliably more when an adult coordinated attention between an object and themselves when compared to when an adult looked only at an object and talked. Clearly triadic relations within social situations are existent very early in development and are used to determine which aspects of the world are socially important (Reid & Striano, in press). However, those cues that infants use to determine when information is directed towards them are still being mapped and are largely unknown, particularly cross-modally. It is likely that information from multiple sources converges temporally to summate to some threshold that alerts the infant that information is directed for their consumption.
Contingency detection
Contingency detection, or “the ability to establish when to consider others’ behavior as feedback onto one’s own” (Henning & Striano, 2004, p.145) is unquestionably a crucial aspect of human communication and intersubjectivity. Research into early caregiver-infant interactions has found that parental responses to infant behavior usually occur within the short space of 1-2 seconds following the infants' behavior (e.g., Keller, Lohaus, Völker, Cappenberg, & Chasiotis, 1999). In one study, the sensitivity of three- and six-month-old infants' to interpersonal timing was assessed as well as maternal sensitivity. The timing of interactions was manipulated from one to three seconds in delay. They found that the infants at three and six months were sensitive to the smallest manipulations of time, whereas mothers failed to detect delays in infant behavior of one second. Clearly by three months, infants are not only sensitive to overall interpersonal contingency but also to the timing of social interaction.
Contingency is vital in order to establish a sense of reciprocity with another. Also, it may provide cues about the referential aspects of communicative signals that are essential in understanding others’ intentions (Baldwin, 1993). As
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Henning and Striano (2004, p.146) point out, “timing provides a cue to contingent relatedness and might therefore be used to detect the responsive nature of others’ behavior onto one’s own.” Perhaps the fundamental nature of timing ensures that it is usually not mentioned in models of social interaction and their implications for leaning outcomes. Indeed, in order to effectively learn, assumptions are constantly made and never explicitly addressed regarding contingent timing and on the relations between discrete units of information across time. Key components of contingency detection are likely determined via specific conduits of social information, such as eye gaze, facial expression and physical orientation of the body.
Faces and Eye gaze
It has been known for some years that young infants discriminate among a range of facial expressions directed at them (see Walker-Andrews, 1997 for review). For instance, by three months of age, infants visually discriminate between happy and angry facial expressions (Barrera & Maurer, 1981). Using a peek-a-boo paradigm, Montague and Walker-Andrews (2001) demonstrated that infants as young as 4 months discriminated others’ emotional expressions (fear, anger, happiness, surprise) and responded in a socially appropriate manner.
As well as attending to emotionality on faces, infants show a robust sensitivity to manipulations in other’s eyes. Already from birth infants look longer at someone with direct compared to averted gaze (Farroni, Massaccesi, Pividori, & Johnson, 2004). By 3-4 months of age, infants reliably follow the direction of an adult’s eye gaze (D’Entremont, Hains, & Muir, 1997; Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998), and manifest enhanced neural processing of faces with direct compared to averted gaze (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002). The ability to tune into and follow other’s eye gaze is considered foundational to several aspects of social and cognitive development (e.g., Reid, Csibra, Belsky, & Johnson, in press). Even by 4 months, research has shown that infants’ attention is not simply tethered; rather the object at which they look is processed, with information about the object extracted (Reid & Striano, 2005). The information obtained may include (for example) the shape or colour of the object.
Perhaps the most complex visual information infants experience is human movement. The parameters of human movement ensure that this is a continuous flow of data in which discrete nodes of semantic information are embedded (Baldwin, Baird, Saylor, & Clark, 2001). Of these movements, eye gaze is perhaps the most important on a social level for an infant to process and interpret (see Reid & Striano, in press, for a more detailed discussion). In brief, this is because infants may use the direction of an adults’ gaze to determine what is salient in a very large and unusual environment. This enhanced attention might allow infants to predict what objects the adult will act upon, thereby providing time for the infant to react
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socially and emotionally to changes that occur in the setting. There are other implications as well: the ability to determine eye gaze direction allows for shared information processing between an infant and another person, such as gaze following or joint attention. Such a capability allows infants to predict the actions of others’, thereby providing a template with which to understand complex aspects of others’ behaviour, such as intentions or goal directed operations. Within this framework, it is interesting to note that gaze following skills at 10 months appear to be related to language abilities at 18 months (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005).
Thus, infants come to learn about others not just via examination of the face or detecting gaze direction. Infants learn about others via a series of interlinked social-cognitive transactions that relate looking to others with assessing the observed persons actions, such as eye gaze direction, reaching and grasping. These tasks are all performed within a temporally contingent framework and learning about others and the wider world is conducted via dyadic or triadic associations.
SOCIAL ANXIETY – DEVELOPMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM – IV) (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) social anxiety is a marked and persistent fear of one or more social and performance situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or to possible scrutiny by others. Usually the individual fears that he or she will be humiliated or embarrassed. When avoidance of a social situation is not possible, the exposure to the social situation provokes anxiety, sometimes to the intensity required to induce a panic attack. The manifestation of these symptoms interferes significantly with the daily living of the individual, bringing disruption of both social and professional life. These symptoms are described as being specific for adults, teenagers and children, with the specification that children usually may not experience the self reflexive aspects of this mental disorder. In other words, children might not be aware that the fear is excessive or unreasonable.
According to Clark’s model (Clark & Wells, 1995; Clark, 2001), social phobia in adults is maintained through a vicious cycle. Throughout ontogeny, the individual seems to acquire a set of dysfunctional assumptions about the significance of social situations. These include: excessively high personal standards for their social performance; conditional beliefs concerning the consequences of performing in a certain way; and unconditional negative beliefs about the self. The approach of a relevant social situation activates these assumptions. This leads to a perceived social danger, the prediction of personal failure and to the fallacious interpretation of benign or ambiguous social stimuli as signs of negative evaluation by others. This leads to increased levels of anxiety and the processing of the self as a social object involving both reduced processing of
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social cues and negatively biased processing of the external social situation. For example, the equation of internal sensation with negative observation by others – “I feel like blushing = others can see my extremely red face”. The presence of safety behaviours such as generally avoiding social situations and avoiding eye contact prevents the disconfirmation of these distortions, maintaining and strengthening them over time.
Perhaps the most important criteria in the diagnosis of social anxiety refer to the degree of impairment that symptoms produce in someone’s life. This allows for a broad range of manifestations of different symptoms that do not meet the criteria of social anxiety as listed in the DSM-IV. This may particularly be the case for children, where the individual does not see the symptoms as impairing his/her life. In this case, it is potentially more appropriate to consider social anxiety as a continuum with different degrees of social fear, in which milder social fears/social situation avoidance, generalized social phobia and extreme social withdrawal are situated at the higher end (Rapee & Spence, 2004).
Social anxiety is the third most common psychiatric disorder, with 13% of the general population experiencing some symptoms at some point throughout the lifespan (Kashdan & Herbert, 2001). Even though the onset of the disorder was considered to be during mid-adolescence or no earlier than the age of eight (Beidel, Turner, & Morris, 1999), different symptoms have been reported in children as young as 2.5 years, when social phobia is identified as a distinct disorder in the broader family of anxiety disorders (Spence, Rapee, McDonald, & Ingram, 2001). The recognition of social phobia as being specific for very young children has motivated a series of research studies aimed at identifying those symptoms specific for these young ages, as well as their ontogenetic trajectory. Even though this research is at an early stage, it has already provided some useful insights at the theoretical and clinical levels (Spence et al., 2001; Morris et al., 2004).
In the following, we outline the social anxiety type symptoms specific for different ages, starting with toddlerhood. Even though some of them do not meet the diagnostic criteria for the disorder as specified by the DSM – IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), they are nonetheless considered as atypical manifestations, increasing the likelihood of being related with the development of social anxiety disorder throughout the lifespan.
Infancy and Toddlerhood (8-15 months)
Around the age of 7-9 months, infants typically start to manifest fear towards social and non-social novelty. They might fear approaching a new toy or a new person, and this fearfulness is considered to be a sign of developing self-regulatory abilities through the inhibition of a prepotent response (Rothbart, Ellis, & Posner, 2004). The extreme manifestation of fearfulness is characterized by persistent distress and refusal to engage with the new object or person, fearful
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facial expressions, crying, clinging to their parents, which can last for more than a couple of minutes (Kagan, 1994). More importantly, the extreme manifestation of fearfulness seems to be stable throughout early childhood (Kagan, Reznick, & Snidman, 1988; Kerr, Lambert, Stattin, & Blackenberg-Larsson, 1994).
Early childhood
As early as 3 years of age, anxiety symptoms can be differentiated into five distinct dimensions reflecting: social phobia, separation anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, fear of physical injury and generalized anxiety, with social phobia being one of the first order factors (Spence et al., 2001). At this age, children might often present intense fear and attempt to avoid unfamiliar peers and adults, despite affectionate interaction with close family members and peers. Social anxiety symptoms are also among the top ten most prevalent anxiety symptoms of preschoolers: approaching a group of children to join their activities; meeting unfamiliar people; fear of talking/show/tell in front of the preschool group (for the 4 and 5 year olds) and worries that she/he will do something to look stupid in front of other people (for 5 year olds) (Spence et al., 2001). These fears can be debilitating since children may refuse to talk to new children or adults, play with unfamiliar peers, or even go to places where they may encounter new children. At extremes they may even refuse to talk to people who are not entirely familiar to them. Also, late preschool is the age of onset of selective mutism that it is considered as an extreme manifestation of social phobia (Schneider, Blanco, Antia, & Liebowitz, 2002).
Again, at this age, fearfulness inhibition (as the tendency to inhibit approaching new social and physical stimuli) is also associated with reduced social interaction. These children being quiet and subdued, avoidant of approaching new peers and have reduced or absent spontaneous comments or smiles (Kagan et al., 1984). While not every child that manifests fearful inhibition develops later social anxiety, there appears to be a strong relationship between parental anxiety disorder and their offspring displaying inhibited behaviour (Rosenbaum, Biederman, Hirshfeld-Becker, Kagan, Snidman, Friedman, Nineberg, Gallery, & Faraone, 2000) and even increased risk for social phobia at the age of 6 years (Biederman et al., 2001), 7 to 8 years (Hirshfeld et al., 1992) and 13 years (Schwartz, Snidman, & Kagan, 1999).
RELATIONS BETWEEN EARLY SOCIAL COGNITION AND SOCIAL PHOBIA
A recent aetiological model of social phobia (Rapee & Spence, 2004)
suggests that the starting point of this disorder lies in broad internal factors that are modulated by external factors in such a way as to lead to different degrees of social
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anxiety. Genes, temperament, cognitive factors and social skills deficits are posed to be the internal factors. Parental and peer influences, aversive social outcomes, negative life events and poor social skills are just some of the broad environmental factors that supposedly act upon internal factors and lead to varying degrees of social phobia.
The increasing number of studies suggests a strong heritability for social phobia, ranging from 0.31 to 0.65 (Kendler, Neale, Kessler, Heath, & Eaves, 1992; Beatty, Heisel, Hall, Levine, & LaFrance, 2002). Even though there seems to be a degree of genetic factors that account for anxieties, genetic factors alone explain only 5% of the variance in social fears, with 13% of social fear explained by a specific genetic factor (Kendler, Myers, Prescott, & Neale, 2001).
As previously mentioned, temperamental characteristics such as behavioural inhibition or shyness are highly predictive of later social anxieties. 61% of children categorized as highly inhibited at the age of two manifest social anxiety in later adolescence (Schwartz, Snidman, & Kagan, 1999). This seems of more importance when considering the distinction between social and physical wariness and the fact that the social wariness dimension of behavioural inhibition is more stable during the life span (Gest, 1997). When regarding the role of genetic factors and temperament for the aetiology of social phobia, the early (social) cognitive aspects related to social phobia are still largely ignored. They pose a conundrum to current models of social phobia. More than likely there is a developmental process for thinking, attending and interpreting the social world that is skewed or distorted from ontogenetic norms, such that the world is perceived as threatening (Rapee & Spence, 2004). There is also the probability that the processing of social stimuli in a threatening manner is related to both genetic and temperamental characteristics. At this stage, issues associated with how genetic and temperamental factors become related to distorted social information processing have not been addressed, and are in dire need of more research. Predictions can be made based on data from adult studies, albeit with the caveat that such associations can be incorrect. In what follows we will outline some adult findings and relate them to developmental issues within social phobia research.
Multiple paradigms and methodologies have shown that adults suffering from social anxiety disorder also manifest atypical processing of faces, particularly when emotional expressions are involved. Atypical patterns are evident both at the behavioural and the neurobiological level. At the behavioural level, people identified as high in social anxiety will process less characteristics of a happy emotional expression. This has been shown by better memory performances for angry faces when compared to happy faces (D’Argembeau, Van der Linden, Etienne, & Comblain, 2003). Also, it seems that socially anxious adults are faster in identifying angry faces when compared to happy or neutral facial expressions
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(Gilboa-Schechtman, Presburger, Marom, & Hermesh, 2005). At the neurobiological level, Phan, Fitzgerald, Nathan, and Tancer (2006) found that the amygdala is hyperactive to harsh, angry and neutral faces in people with higher levels of social anxiety. These authors also found that the right amygdala (which normally habituates to harsh, angry faces) reduces its activity level in normal subjects, but not in those diagnosed with high levels of social anxiety. Therefore the participants high in social phobia were unable to regulate themselves in accordance with typical patterns of emotional information processing.
Further evidence supports the view that fundamental skills learned early in ontogeny are distorted in adults diagnosed as socially phobic. In an eye tracking study, Horley, Williams, Gonsalvez, and Gordon (2004) found that social phobics displayed hyperscanning of emotional expressions, such that they scanned the face more than control subjects but, relative to controls, they avoided foveal fixations on the eyes. This, they suggested, was consistent with models of social phobia where fears of negative evaluation by others lead to distorted cognitive processing of the information. Direct eye contact would instigate social engagement and thereby a potentially negative situation. The hyperscanning of the face was posited to be related to the search for clues as to the emotional state of the observed individual. Such information would be vital for the anticipation of potential sources of social threat. Other research shows that for social phobics, an increase in amplitude of the right parietal N170 component of the event-related potential is associated with the detection of anger in faces (Kolassa & Miltner, in press).
Studies such as Phan et al., (2006) provide strong empirical support for current models of social phobia. However, such studies do not question the origin of social phobia. As stated previously, by 4 months, infants are capable of discriminating emotions. Based on current models of social phobia, this suggests that an atypical interaction between more environmental factors (e.g. exposure to negative social situations), and more internal ones (e.g. high sensitivity to potentially threatening social stimuli) must either be present prior to 4 months or override typical processing mechanisms at a later date.
New evidence from early social cognition suggests that infants at 4 months detect when an angry emotional expression is directed toward or away from them (Striano, Kopp, Grossmann, & Reid, 2006). This suggests that limited experience is required to learn norms in typically prevalent social information. The issue then becomes how much atypical information must be processed before behaviour consistent with social phobia is manifested. Not only that, but these basic mechanisms manifested in early development must become distorted, such that neutral social information is interpreted as being negative. After all, given the failure to engage with key components of the face (Horley et al., 2004) and the enhanced awareness of negative emotions in social phobics (Kolassa & Miltner, in press), it is likely that very basic perceptual mechanisms are being employed to ensure that (1) social interactions are not detected, such as mutual eye gaze and (2)
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this avoidance of key aspects of others behaviour leads to an impairment in the prediction of others’ intentions, requiring elevated arousal to extract this information from less fundamental aspects of the behaviour of others.
How typical information processing becomes distorted is a key issue that deserves greater attention than it currently receives. We suggest that it is likely that there are specific periods in early ontogeny during key social-cognitive developments, such as the transition from dyadic to triadic engagement with the world, that are particularly sensitive to both internal and environmental factors. Should a typically developing infant be exposed to atypical behaviours by a parent, such as failing to engage the infant in reference to key aspects of the environment, then it is likely that atypical social expectations will be formed by the infant. Then, corrupted social expectations in the first postnatal year may well be relevant to understanding fundamental components of the development of social phobia. Does this aspect amplify or becomes more stable given pre-existent internal factors like slightly higher, but not necessary atypical, levels of fearfulness? More likely both these categories of factors (internal and external) are relevant for the development of atypical social information processing found in social phobia. Based on previous research (Bard et al., 1999; Bigelow, 1998), it could be anticipated that a hierarchical type of development, with the emotional and environmental factors each having different points of influence across ontogeny, set the stage for further increments in atypical behaviour. The effect must be cumulative, with certain factors playing a more important role at a certain stage, but may be overridden by other factors later in a dynamic process. This may be the reason why, analyzed at certain points in development, some factors appear to have a more predictive value than others.
Mechanisms associated with detecting social information have been mapped in infancy. These can be interpreted as simplistic models of adult social-cognitive processes and thus can be applied to assist in understanding social phobia. Characteristics of infant social cognition thus far have been indexed in simplistic terms, however this is perhaps their strength when applied to aspects of adult social-cognitive processes, including social phobia (see, for example, Satpute, & Lieberman, 2006, for a cognitive neuroscience perspective on the strength of simplistic models).
FUTURE DIRECTIONS OF RESEARCH
Empirical evidence suggests a strong and stable relationship between early temperamental characteristics and later manifestations of social anxieties. Social wariness as a dimension of behavioural inhibition appears to be particularly stable across life. It may act as a hyper vigilance factor that leads to a tendency towards faster detection and increased processing of social stimuli that may be labeled as threatening. The association between the manifestation of social phobia and the
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parental anxiety disorder suggests that environmental factors may have a role in the selection of the (social) stimuli that the child encounters in the early postnatal months. We already know that infants’ abilities to detect social contingencies or to use gaze and joint attention are partially shaped by the kind of interaction that they have with their parents. It has been shown, for example, that infants of depressed mothers show atypical development of social contingency detection. This is more likely because the depressed mothers display inconsistent interactions with their infant, including delayed and non-contingent responses (Striano, Brennan, & Vanman, 2002). What happens when infants develop in a social environment shaped primarily by a (socially) anxious parent? What are the stimuli that are reinforced by the gaze of important others, such as parents? Critically, how does this interact with an elevated social wariness? Further issues surround the nature of contingent responses in social interactions. Does contingent information, which is transacted between a socially phobic child and an adult, become constrained in some way, thereby causing compounding social difficulties within social interactions?
The very fact that these questions are so broad is indicative of the unexplored fields within early social cognition, particularly when applied to atypical populations.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION The study of infancy has much to offer in terms of understanding human
social cognition as well as impairments in these skills. In recent years, we have learned that infants possess many of the rudimentary skills needed for more mature social cognition. From birth, infants can imitate a range of behaviours that are foundational to understanding the correspondence to self and others. Already by 2-3 months of age, infants are sensitive to minute perturbations in dyadic interaction. By 4 months, they use triadic social cues to learn about the external world. Through the study of infancy, it is possible to understand what types of experiences and basic maturations are necessary to do things like learning from and relating to others, including the prediction and interpretation of other’s behaviour. In terms of understanding anxiety and social phobia, the issue therefore becomes where and when social anxiety manifests itself and how is this related to early experience and atypical development. As we have outlined, anxiety can be detected as early as the age of 3. Although at this age social anxiety symptoms can reach the diagnostic criteria, symptomatic manifestations are more likely to be encountered. Early in infancy, exacerbated atypical social fearfulness is associated with persistent distress (expressed in fearful facial expressions) and refusal to engage with new people. Later on, during preschool and early school years, children present intense fear and attempt to avoid unfamiliar peers and adults. They avoid approaching peers or joining their activities and, also, they fear being evaluated by others
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(manifesting distress, for example, while talking in front of the other kindergarten children). At this age, social anxiety can even reach the level of social withdrawal. According to recent models, atypical development of social information processing accounts for the aetiology of social anxieties along with other factors. Adult research data support this statement by showing that, at least at the level of face perception, individual with social anxiety display marked impairments with exacerbated processing of harsh, angry faces (and lack of habituation to them), and avoidance of foveal fixation, amongst other deficits. When and how during ontogeny these impairments develop are issues in need of further research. Understanding early social cognition may well provide benefits for our understanding of the development of social anxieties. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper was partially supported by CEEX-M1 Grant no. 124 (AnxNeuroCog) from the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research. REFERENCES Baldwin, D. A. (1993). Early referential understanding: Infants’ ability to recognize
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