Behavioral Inhibition and loneliness
This is a long one because I haven’t found a lot on loneliness and I have been intrigued by behavioral inhibition since Kagan first talked about it. Verhagen, Derks, Roelofs & Maciejewski (2022) published “Behavioral Inhibition, Negative Parenting, and Social Withdrawal: Longitudinal associations with loneliness during early, middle, and late adolescence” in Child Development. Here’s an edited version of the article with some information in bold:
Adolescent loneliness can have detrimental effects on physical and mental health, but there is limited understanding of its antecedents in infancy and childhood. A 20-year longitudinal, multi-informant, and multi-methods study (first data collection in 1998) was conducted to examine mechanisms underlying adolescent loneliness (N = 128, 52% boys, Mage_baseline = 1.23, SD = 0.02, 99% White, recruitment in Dutch urban, healthcare centers). High infant behavioral inhibition (BI) was indirectly associated with high loneliness during adolescence via high childhood social withdrawal. This indirect effect was equally strong during early, middle, and late adolescence. Contrary to expectations, infant parenting did not moderate the relation between BI and social withdrawal. The results suggest a developmental cascade with infant BI showing long-lasting indirect effects on adolescent loneliness up to 20 years later via childhood social withdrawal.
Loneliness refers to the negative emotional experience that arises when people perceive their relations to be of inadequate quality or lacking in size (network quantity). Evidence suggests that loneliness is high during adolescence, with 20%–70% of adolescents reporting to feel lonely “sometimes” or “often.” Loneliness can have detrimental effects on one's physical and mental health, including impaired immune functioning and poorer sleep quality. Moreover, adolescent loneliness is associated with depression, with metabolic risk factors linked to cardiovascular disease during adulthood, and is predictive of poorer self-perceived health.
BI is a biologically based temperamental style characterized by a relatively consistent pattern of overly cautious, fearful, and avoidant behavior to unfamiliar people, situations, and contexts. Infants and toddlers who are highly inhibited typically react with more restraint and caution to novel objects and situations, and are more anxious around unfamiliar people than their less inhibited peers. This implies that highly inhibited individuals encounter fewer opportunities to connect with others which—over the long run—could predispose to the experience of loneliness.
Highly inhibited infants and toddlers react to novel situations and stimuli as if they are potentially threatening. Because avoiding certain situations is associated with lower chances of experiencing negative social interactions, prevention behavior is reinforced. This may instigate a cascade of reduced experiences of social successes, less socially competent behaviors, less attempts at social reconnection, and probably more BI or feelings of loneliness.
A possible indirect pathway through which high infant BI might predispose to adolescent loneliness is via social withdrawal during childhood. Social withdrawal is defined as a consistent display of solitary behavior when encountering both familiar and unfamiliar peers. If children show high social withdrawal during this important developmental period, they might not receive such opportunities and be at higher risk for internalizing problems, including loneliness.
Social withdrawal, in turn, is thought to play a key role in the emergence and/or maintenance of loneliness. First, high levels of withdrawn behavior might undermine opportunities to experience meaningful social interaction, which, according to the evolutionary theory of loneliness is crucial for reconnection. Second, avoiding social situations might prevent one from gaining valuable experiences that promote social interaction, which may lead to more deficient social skills over time. Indeed, social withdrawal is concurrently and prospectively associated with increased feelings of loneliness.
Negative parenting is thought to moderate the stability of BI from infancy to childhood. Some parents might restrict their child's behavior, discourage independence, and control their child's activities, leading to fewer opportunities for them to learn how to behave in social situations and this has more pronounced effects in inhibited children. If caregivers display high levels of control and derision, or are insensitive and intrusive toward their behaviorally inhibited child, they are more likely to develop into withdrawn children. In turn, this increased likelihood to become withdrawn might be associated with more loneliness.
In the current 20-year longitudinal study, a multi-informant (i.e., parents, teachers, adolescents, and their peers) and multi-methods (i.e., observations, parent and teacher reports, sociometric nominations, and self-reports) approach was used to investigate the role of BI and negative parenting during infancy, and social withdrawal during childhood in the development of loneliness during early, middle, and late adolescence. In line with expectations, infant BI indirectly predicted adolescent loneliness years later via childhood social withdrawal. The effect of childhood social withdrawal seemed not to differ in strength for loneliness during early, middle, and late adolescence. As opposed to the expectations, BI was not a direct predictor of loneliness during adolescence. Moreover, negative parenting did not moderate the relation between infant BI and childhood social withdrawal.
Most importantly, it was found that infant BI had a significant indirect effect on adolescent loneliness (up to almost 20 years after the first BI assessment) through childhood social withdrawal, above and beyond what feelings of loneliness during childhood predicted.
Contrary to expectations, it was found that infant BI was not directly predictive of adolescent loneliness. The absence of a direct effect could be explained in several ways. The effects of temperamental traits on socio-emotional functioning are likely to diminish as infants grow older; most inhibited infants might simply “grow out of it.” This pattern of discontinuity could be explained by differences in the development of adaptive self-regulatory skills, including attentional control, which can be defined as the degree to which one is able to flexibly monitor and shift attention. This capacity develops mostly from early to middle childhood.
Another finding of the current research is that BI was prospectively related to social withdrawal in childhood, which means that highly inhibited infants are more likely to develop into socially withdrawn children. The tendency to withdraw predicted feelings of adolescent’ loneliness at all ages (except for age 9), which aligns with earlier studies and with existing theories which hypothesize that social withdrawal is positively associated with feelings of loneliness, possibly by reducing the likelihood of having positive social interactions and impairing social skills.
The fact that the effects between the latent factor of social withdrawal and loneliness at the ages of 13, 16, and 21 were more or less similar, evidences the long-lasting effects of infant and childhood precursors in explaining prospective loneliness, although the effects were not large. It could be that a certain default mode of emotions, cognitions, and behaviors is set in one's life which makes it difficult for individuals to “grow out” of high social withdrawal and sets an increased risk for experiencing loneliness across different developmental periods of adolescence. High social withdrawal and low self-esteem might reinforce one another over time.
These results are relevant for developing much needed effective preventions for loneliness that can be implemented at a young age. Specifically, BI and social withdrawal could aid in identifying children with high risk of becoming lonely. Intervention on such early predictors could play an important role in preventing the development of loneliness at a later age and protect adolescents from the detrimental mental and physical health consequences associated with loneliness.
The one thing I wanted to address is the issue of parenting. It seems to me that looking at parenting behavior is tricky because of the transactional nature of the relationship. Not only do many inhibited toddlers outgrow their inhibition, but also, parents may well work with shy children to ensure that they have social connections and don’t feel lonely. The fact that social withdrawal interacts with inhibition to predict loneliness offers a helpful insight.