Multiple Motivations Underlying Children’s Affiliative Behaviour: The Functional Role of Affiliative Language

Abstract

Social connection is one of the most fundamental human needs, shaping behaviour across the entire lifespan. As children develop, language becomes an increasingly central means through which they express their desire to connect with others – their social motivations. Yet relatively little is known about how and why children use language to signal their social motivation, or what individual and contextual factors shape its use. The three studies presented in this dissertation address these gaps by introducing a validated measure of children’s affiliative language use, examining how trait-level individual differences shape communicative patterns across the early stages of a developing peer relationship, and directly testing how experiences of social exclusion influence affiliative language use and the affective processes that may underlie it. Chapter 2 introduces and validates the Child Affiliative Language (CAL) dictionary – a novel, LIWC-based tool for quantifying children’s affiliative language use during naturalistic peer interactions. Affiliative language, as captured by the CAL dictionary, was meaningfully distinct from general talkativeness and broader linguistic ability, but was associated with positive social outcomes including greater peer-reported liking, higher observer-rated social engagement, and increased prosocial sharing. Children also used significantly more affiliative language during an unstructured get-to-know-you task than during a goal-oriented brainstorming task, consistent with the interpretation that the measure captures shifts in social motivation across contexts rather than stable individual differences in communicative style. Chapter 3 uses a longitudinal dyadic approach to examine how temperamental shyness shapes children’s verbal communication across three sessions with the same previously unfamiliar peer. Despite speaking less than their less shy peers, shy children used a greater proportion of affiliative language during their initial interaction, suggesting that when shy children do speak, they are more likely to do so in ways that signal warmth and the desire to connect. Verbal reticence also longitudinally mediated the association between shyness and outside observers’ ratings of social engagement; yet shy children were liked just as much by their own interaction partners, highlighting a meaningful discrepancy between how children’s peer relationships appear to outside observers and how those relationships are experienced. Chapter 4 uses an experimental paradigm to examine how experiences of social exclusion shape affiliative language use in children and adolescents. Excluded youth spoke significantly less than those in the inclusion condition during a subsequent social interaction. Contrary to expectations, social exclusion did not directly predict greater affiliative language use. Age was also unexpectedly negatively associated with affiliative language use, such that older adolescents used less affiliative language than younger children across conditions. Importantly, individual differences in perceived physiological reactivity to the exclusion task uniquely predicted greater affiliative language use, suggesting that it may be the subjective affective experience of social stress, rather than the objective experience of exclusion itself, that shapes how youth use language to signal their social motivations. Together, these findings suggest that affiliative language is a sensitive, dynamic index of children’s social motivation – one shaped by both stable individual differences and the social situations that children find themselves in. The results further suggest that affiliative language may serve not only an interpersonal function, but an intrapersonal, regulatory function as well. These studies lay the groundwork for a broader program of research into the motivated, context-sensitive, and multiply determined nature of children’s social communication, and offers a new lens through which children’s social development can be understood and supported.