This study explored the relationship between anxiety and the social information processing (SIP) model. Children’s responses to several stages of the SIP model were assessed after children had undergone anxious mood induction procedures, and similarities and differences between anxious and aggressive children were examined. Furthermore, temperament and heritability were investigated in relation to anxiety and stages of the SIP model. Data were collected from 45 families within the Southern Illinois Twins/Triplets and Siblings Study (SITSS). Results showed that children’s anxiety was related to generating avoidant responses in one stage of the SIP model, whereas children’s aggression was not significantly associated with any SIP stage. Children’s worried and angry mood states predicted avoidant and aggressive responses, respectively. Temperament was not significantly related to anxiety or stages of the SIP model. Lastly, there was evidence of heritability for child-rated anxiety, but not for parent-rated anxiety or stages of the SIP model. Overall, this study provides important information about possible contributors to children’s maladaptive social behavior.

Children with reading difficulties (RD) are also likely to experience psychosocial problems. However, a significant proportion (30-50%) are indistinguishable, in psychosocial terms, from their typically-achieving (TA) peers. The aim of the current study was to identify aspects of social information processing which serve a protective function for children with RD, in terms of their at-risk status for concomitant psychosocial problems. Method: The sample comprised 42 children (21 with RD, and 21 TA), aged 9-11 years, with 11 boys and 10 girls in each group. A multifactor procedure was used to classify children as RD, based on the inclusionary criteria of teacher selection, and reading achievement below the 25th percentile, as well as several exclusionary criteria. The reading subtests of the WIAT-II, and the KBIT-2 (non-verbal IQ) measures were used to identify the presence of RD according to these criteria. The dependent variable, behavioural symptoms, was assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, which was rated by both parents and teachers. Children (RD and TA) completed measures of theory of mind, understanding emotions in facial expression and tone of voice, attachment style, and affective experience. Results: As expected, RD were correlated with increased levels of psychosocial problems, and poorer theory of mind skills predicted increased psychosocial problems. Consistent with hypotheses, emotion understanding, positive affect, and secure attachment, moderated the link between RD and psychosocial problems. That is, better emotion understanding, more positive affect, and secure attachment status, functioned as protective factors for children in the RD group, but not those in the TA group. Conclusion: The findings are discussed in relation to extant findings, as well as within a risk and protective framework. Finally, strengths and limitations of the current study are described, and implications for psychosocial interventions suggested.

Bullying is a pervasive problem among children and adolescents worldwide, but relevant research, although growing, lacks coherence. The proposed study is the first to integrate three large bodies of research - on children's attachment, anger, and Social Information Processing (SIP) - in a comprehensive, developmentally informed, multi-method, multi-trait design to elucidate the origins of bullying behavior, victimization, and anti-bullying attitudes and emotions. It was predicted that (1) children's early attachment insecurity would be linked to their maladaptive SIP patterns and to higher anger proneness; (2) higher anger proneness would be associated with maladaptive SIP; (3) anger proneness and maladaptive SIP would both predict greater parent-reported aggression; (4) parent-reported aggression would predict both bullying behavior and victimization; (5) lower anger proneness and more adaptive SIP would be associated with anti-bullying attitudes and sympathy for victims of bullying. A series of path analyses revealed overall well-fitting models; however, the analyses of the specific pathways described in the hypotheses above were less conclusive. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that attachment security, anger proneness, and social information processing each plays a role in the development of positive or negative peer relations, but how these factors come together needs to be further elucidated.

The past few years have seen the rapid rise of all things “social” on the web from the growth of online social networks like Facebook, to real-time communication services like Twitter, to user-contributed content sites like Flickr and YouTube, to content aggregators like Digg. Beyond these popular Web 2.0 successes, the emer- gence of Social Information Systems is promising to fundamentally transform what information we encounter and digest, how businesses market and engage with their customers, how universities educate and train a new generation of researchers, how the government investigates terror networks, and even how political regimes interact with their citizenry. Users have moved from being passive consumers of information (via querying or browsing) to becoming active participants in the creation of data and knowledge artifacts, actively sorting, ranking, and annotating other users and artifacts. This fundamental shift to social systems places new demands on providing de- pendable capabilities for knowing whom to trust and what information to trust, given the open and unregulated nature of these systems. The emergence of large-scale user participation in Social Information Systems suggests the need for the development of user-centric approaches to information quality. As a step in this direction this research proposes an interaction-based approach for modeling the notion of user im- portance. The interaction-based model is centered around the uniquely social aspects of these systems, by treating who communicates with whom (an interaction) as a core building block in evaluating user importance. We first study the interaction characteristics of Twitter, one of the most buzzworthy recent Social Web successes, examining the usage statistics, growth patterns, and user interaction behavior of over 2 million participants on Twitter. We believe this is the first large-scale study of dynamic interactions on a real-world Social Information System. Based on the anal- ysis of the interaction structure of Twitter, the second contribution of this thesis research is an exploration of approaches for measuring user importance. As part of this exploration, we study several different approaches that build on the inherent interaction-based framework of Social Information Systems. We explore this model through an experimental study over an interaction graph consisting of 800,000 nodes and about 1.9 million interaction edges. The user importance modeling approaches that we present can be applied to any Social Information System in which interactions between users can be monitored.

The role of emotion within the reformulated Social Information Processing (SIP) Model of Children’s Social Adjustment (Crick and Dodge, 1994) has not been well investigated, particularly for young children. A developmental model of SIP and emotion proposed by de Castro (2010), provided the theoretical foundation for the current study to incorporate emotion processing variables into a pre-existing SIP interview for preschool children (SIPI-P, Ziv and Sorongon, 2011). The primary aims of this study were to (1) investigate age differences across social and emotional information processing between early childhood and early primary school aged children, (2) to describe the associations among children’s social and emotional information processing and behavioural characteristics, and (3) to replicate and extend the results of Helmsen,Koglin, and Petermann(2012) by examining the relationship between regulation (emotion and behavioural), information processing (social and emotional), and child behavioural difficulties (externalising and internalising). Two cohorts of children were recruited (30 children aged 4 years old and 30 children aged 6 to 7 years old), who were administered an expanded SIPI-P interview and a self-regulation task. In addition, children’s parents completed a questionnaire assessing internalising and externalising behaviours and emotion regulation. The results showed very few differences between the two groups of children for SIP, but consistent differences for emotion processing. Younger children rated aggressive responses more favourably, perceived more emotional intensity in the hypothetical vignettes, and showed lower levels of emotional reasoning and perspective taking skills when compared to the older children. Results also showed rather distinct patterns of associations for the two groups between social and emotion processing variables and behavioural and regulatory measures. For the preschool aged children there were consistent substantive associations between behavioural regulation and the social and emotion information processing variables, but very few associations with emotion regulation and internalising or externalising behaviours. For the early primary school aged children, there were several substantive associations between the social and emotion information procesing variables and internalising behaviours, but very few associations with behaviour regulation, emotion regulation, or externalising behaviours. Finally, when emotion information processing and emotion regulation were jointly tested as predictors of internalising behaviours with the primary school children, the results showed that only emotion regulation remained a significant predictor. Overall, the inclusion of emotion understanding variables in a social information processing interview format demonstrated that parsimonious integration of the two areas is both achievable and successful in yielding useful research information and suggests that the SIP model may be effectively used to explore other domains of social cognition and social competence.

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Children with reading difficulties (RD) are also likely to experience psychosocial problems. However, a significant proportion (30-50%) are indistinguishable, in psychosocial terms, from their typically-achieving (TA) peers. The aim of the current study was to identify aspects of social information processing which serve a protective function for children with RD, in terms of their at-risk status for concomitant psychosocial problems. Method: The sample comprised 42 children (21 with RD, and 21 TA), aged 9-11 years, with 11 boys and 10 girls in each group. A multifactor procedure was used to classify children as RD, based on the inclusionary criteria of teacher selection, and reading achievement below the 25th percentile, as well as several exclusionary criteria. The reading subtests of the WIAT-II, and the KBIT-2 (non-verbal IQ) measures were used to identify the presence of RD according to these criteria. The dependent variable, behavioural symptoms, was assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, which was rated by both parents and teachers. Children (RD and TA) completed measures of theory of mind, understanding emotions in facial expression and tone of voice, attachment style, and affective experience. Results: As expected, RD were correlated with increased levels of psychosocial problems, and poorer theory of mind skills predicted increased psychosocial problems. Consistent with hypotheses, emotion understanding, positive affect, and secure attachment, moderated the link between RD and psychosocial problems. That is, better emotion understanding, more positive affect, and secure attachment status, functioned as protective factors for children in the RD group, but not those in the TA group. Conclusion: The findings are discussed in relation to extant findings, as well as within a risk and protective framework. Finally, strengths and limitations of the current study are described, and implications for psychosocial interventions suggested.

The relationship between exposure to violence and aggression has been examined by many researchers. It has been reported that physically abused children and children from violent communities have more aggressive behavior than non-abused peers or peers from non-violent communities (Dodge et al., 1990; Dodge, 1993; Miller et al., 1999). In addition, it has been reported that children who are physically abused have social information processing deficits. However, the relationship between community violence exposure and aggression has yet to be fully explored. The present study proposed an underlying mechanism (i.e., social information processing deficits) that could be mediating the relationship between exposure to community violence and subsequent aggressive behavior. This study also looked at aggression more specifically and categorized the sample into reactive and proactive aggression. Thirty-nine children, aged 7-13 years, from a mostly rural setting were recruited to participate in this study. Self-report measures of community violence exposure, social information processing deficits (i.e., hostile or instrumental biases), and aggression (i.e., reactive or proactive) were included while controlling for child abuse potential and conflict in the home. The hypotheses of this study were not supported. Instead, the results supported a relationship between child abuse potential, social information processing biases, and aggression. Child abuse potential remained significant throughout the analyses, which suggests that it plays a larger role in the manifestation of aggressive behavior in children than does community violence exposure. Overall, the findings from this study are consistent with Dodge's work and has implications for treating children who are aggressive. / Master of Science

Recent evidence has shown that fruit fly adults and larvae are heavily attracted to food sites occupied by larvae. This attraction is especially strong in mated females that are looking for a suitable site for egg laying. In the first set of experiments, we compared the value assigned to social information provided by larvae at a site to the nutritional information that a female has access to by sampling a food. Lowering food quality did decrease egg-laying preference for a food, but females still showed a much stronger preference for occupied foods. We theorized that the social egg-laying preference may be due to an advantage of developing near older larvae. However, eggs that developed near larvae showed lower survival to adulthood, slower development time, and lower adult body mass. Females were also not able to reduce their social egg-laying preference, even when foods were already heavily occupied by larvae. Finally, we found that larvae were not better able to identify a high quality food site than an adult female, and thus the smell of used food was not a reliable cue to the quality of a site. These results provide evidence that the preference for females to lay eggs near larvae is very robust but the exact benefit it provides for the female and her offspring is unknown. We then ran a series of experiments to test larval social information use to see if they value it as heavily as adult females. Our experiments consisted of focal larvae being put on lower quality food and trying to find a higher quality food nearby that was either occupied or unoccupied by a single model larva. Larvae did not reliably use this social information. Overall, it is unclear whether the larvae are using social information to help them find higher quality foods. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)