One early indicator of psychopathology risk for small children shows up in patterns of fear behaviors. In our new paper Capturing temporal dynamics of fear behaviors on a moment‐to‐moment basis, published in Infancy, we apply discrete sequence methods to data about children’s responses to a fearful situation.
One of the very cool things about this paper is that we identify a few different clusters of child behavior. We were hoping to find a way to identify a high fear group at risk to show dysregulated fear, which has psychopathology implications. We found them to some extent, but also identified some other groups that are interesting: a group of external regulators, who use a parent to help regulate their emotions; one low reactive group, who just aren’t that scared by things; and a cool group called fearful explorers who show fear, but don’t let it stop them from checking things out. This work provides some new data points to help understand the emergence of emotion regulation across child development.