Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Tracy L. Morris.

Abstract

Previous research relating anxiety and facial affect recognition, focusing mostly on school-aged children and adults, has yielded mixed results. The current study sought to demonstrate an association among behavioral inhibition and parent-reported social anxiety, shyness, social withdrawal and facial affect recognition performance using the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Scale in 30 preschool children, ages 4 years to 5 years 8 months. Results indicated that social anxiety, social withdrawal, shyness, and behavioral inhibition together account for 25% of the variance in facial affect recognition performance, although this proportion was not statistically significant r2 = .25, F(4,24) = 1.95, p = .13. A limit of the investigation was the relatively small sample size. Further studies with larger samples are required to better understand the possible association.

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