Social Anxiety in Children May be Due to Low and Advanced Emotional Intelligence

Socially anxious children can be both low and advanced on
emotional intelligence, according to researchers at University of Amsterdam.
The researchers pointed out that
from early childhood, children are motivated to bond with others. However, for
socially anxious children, emotional intelligence (EI)may be one of the most
important competencies to acquire. Either socially anxious children lack EI or
has too much of it. The findings are based on an analysis of children in the
age group of 8-12 who were asked about their social anxiety levels. Their
parents were also involved in the study.
The researchers then examined
the children’s emotional intelligence by assessing their ability to read
others’ emotions (known as mind reading) by using the Reading the Mind in the
Eye Test (RMET). With this test, the team was able to see how accurate children
are at recognising the mental states of others based on photographs of the eye
region of different people’s faces. Finally, children were asked to sing a song
on stage while being observed by a small audience. During their performance,
the researchers measured their blushing, an index of public self-consciousness.
The results showed that both
low and advanced emotional intelligence are related to childhood social
anxiety. ‘We discovered that children with clinical levels of social anxiety
tend to have low emotional intelligence, while children with above average
emotional intelligence tend to have sub-clinical levels of social anxiety, but
only when they are highly self-conscious as a result of being exposed to the
judgment of others’, says Dr Milica Nikolić, post-doctoral researcher of
Developmental Psychopathology at the UvA and lead author of the study. ‘This
suggests that, contrary to the two opposing views, both low and high emotional
intelligence can be a characteristic of
socially anxious children.’
Intervention strategies for both groups
The team’s findings have important
clinical implications for intervention efforts targeting social anxiety in
children. ‘It must be noted that whereas children with a decreased ability to
mindread may be at risk of developing social anxiety disorder, whereas those
with advanced mindreading abilities may also develop high levels of social
anxiety if they are also highly self-conscious’, says Nikolić. ‘Both of these
disturbances in socio-cognitive abilities may have an impact on children’s
social functioning in everyday life, leading them to fear and avoid social
situations.’
Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13248
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