The malleability of behavior inhibition: A study of individual developmental functions.

Abstract

A longitudinal study of children's individual developmental functions in observed inhibited behavior toward strangers and in teacher judgments of inhibition in school showed that IQ and teacher judgments of social competence predicted a decrease in both measures of inhibition over a 6-year period from ages 4 through 10 years. These findings suggest that, with increasing age, more intelligent or socially competent children can overcome inhibition in laboratory and school settings better than less competent children. Over the last 30 years, children's inhibited behavior in unfamiliar situations has been the focus of continuing developmental research (Kagan & Moss, 1962; Kagan, Reznick, Clarke, Snidman, & Garcia-Coll, 1984; Thomas, Chess, Birch, Hertzig, & Korn, 1963). When children encounter a new environment, a stranger, or a novel object, they often show signs of an approach-avoidance conflict. Although they appear interested in the unfamiliar, they are hesitant to explore it. Inhibited motor activity, often resulting in a stiff body posture, prolonged looking at the novel person or object from a distance, and a long latency in first contact with the person or object, includes some of these overt indications of the approach-avoidance conflict (Asendorpf, 1990, 1991, 1992b; Coplan, Rubin, Fox, & Calkins, in press; Kagan, 1989; Kagan et al., 1984). There are large interindividual differences in the extent to