Toddlers’ Anxiety Predicts Their Creativity at The Age of Five: The Chain Mediation Effects of General Cognition and Mastery

Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2022-01-21

成童 程南华 王美芳 王争艳

Abstract：

Anxiety is an aversive emotional and motivational state occurring in threatening circumstances, mainly including general anxiety and separation anxiety in early childhood. General anxiety is a kind of trait anxiety relating to general susceptibility to anxiety, while separation anxiety belongs to the state anxiety determined interactively by trait and situational stress. Previous studies have demonstrated the negative effects of anxiety on creativity, but less is known about the mechanisms of these effect, particular the longitudinal effects of anxiety on creativity from toddlerhood to preschool period. Processing Efficiency Theory and Attentional Control Theory explained the effect of anxiety on cognition from the perspective of cognitive processing. Moreover, childhood anxiety may longitudinally affect later development of creativity through neuroendocrine system. That is, anxiety activates the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA axis) with releasing glucocorticoids, which are associated with the development of higher-order cognitive function. Thus, we assumed that anxiety in early childhood had a longitudinal adverse effect on later development of creativity. Further, the present study explored the mechanisms between early childhood anxiety and creativity in preschool period. The general cognitive ability, a foundamental component of creativity, and motivation may be candidate mediated variables. According to Piaget’s cognitive development theory, a necessary precondition for the development from one cognitive stage to a higher stage is that the individual encounters with discrepancies between the previous schema and the current stimulus, which lead to the motivation to achieve a new cognitive balance. These views suggested that cognition and motivation may be two closely intertwined processes, and general cognitive functions play a decisive role in motivation activation. For younger children, the motivation is reflected in the persistence on objects and people and so on, namely mastery motivation. Accordingly, a longitudinal study was designed to examine the relation between anxiety of toddlers and their creativity when they were 5 years old, and investigate the underlying mechanism by chain mediation effects of general cognitive function and mastery motivation. 

96 families (42 boys and 54 girls) were recruited from the local communities and child care clinics in urban areas of Beijing. At 14 and 25 months, infants’ general anxiety and

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