ARE ANXIOUS WITHDRAWN CHILDREN INHIBITED IN THE CONTEXT OF NOVEL SOCIAL SITUATIONS

Two theoretical perspectives may be invoked to explain social withdrawal in early childhood. The first casts the concept of behavioral inhibition toward the unfamiliar as a temperamental predisposition with temporal stability, and situational consistency. The second concerns the quality of adaptation of the child to his habitual environment and suggests that social withdrawal arises from mother-child or child-child relationships. In the present study, no relation was found between these two measures of inhibition in novel social situations and anxious-withdrawn behavior in the child's preschool environment. We view this result as confirmation of the conceptual distinction between an initial response to the unfamiliar and the habitual response to the everyday environment. The finding that maternal behavior was coherently related to the child's social inhibition suggests that exogenous as well as endogenous factors are involved.