A groundbreaking research study has uncovered new insights into how children with social anxiety process and respond to mistakes at different ages. The findings, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, demonstrate that younger children with social anxiety have more difficulty refocusing after errors compared to older children with the same condition.
The research team, led by PhD student Olivia Stibolt at Florida International University, examined 214 children between ages 7 and 17 who were referred to a specialized anxiety clinic. Using an innovative computer-based attention task and advanced mathematical modeling, they analyzed how children responded immediately after making mistakes.
"We found that among those with more social anxiety symptoms, only younger children showed less ability to focus attention after errors, while older children did not show this deficit," explained Stibolt. This age-related pattern emerged around ages 11-13, suggesting that as children develop better cognitive control, social anxiety may have less impact on their post-error processing abilities.
The study utilized a specialized computer task called the flanker task, where children had to quickly identify the direction of a center arrow while ignoring surrounding arrows. Through detailed analysis using the Shrinking Spotlight Drift-Diffusion Model, researchers gained precise measurements of children's attention patterns following errors.
The research revealed that younger children with higher social anxiety levels struggled more with refocusing their attention after making mistakes. However, this relationship gradually disappeared as children aged, indicating that developmental changes may help overcome these initial processing challenges.
These findings have important implications for how social anxiety is assessed and treated in young people. "Our results show that multiple stages of cognitive control are influenced by age," noted Stibolt. "These age-based differences highlight the importance of taking age into consideration for assessments and treatments for pediatric social anxiety."
The research team acknowledges that further studies are needed to understand how these patterns might manifest in real-world social situations. They plan to continue investigating how brain development during childhood and adolescence relates to social anxiety treatment approaches.
This research marks an important step forward in understanding how social anxiety affects cognitive processes differently across childhood and adolescence, potentially leading to more effective, age-appropriate interventions for young people struggling with social anxiety.