Environmental Sensitivity in Primary School Children

Abstract

Individuals differ in their susceptibility to environmental influences, with some being more and some being less affected by variations in the quality of their environment. Much of the research on susceptibility—or environmental sensitivity—in children to date has focused on the effects that the quality of the rearing environment has on them, but little is known about how this trait influences children in the school context. The present thesis aims to address several gaps in the literature. Firstly, we developed new sensitivity measures to assess primary school children’s sensitivity through teacher reports (Chapter 3) and interviews with multiple informants (Chapter 4). Secondly, I aimed to explore how children’s sensitivity relates to emotion recognition skills (Chapter 5) as well as visual working memory and visual attention (Chapter 6). Finally, I investigated sensitive children’s responses to different aspects of school quality over time and across countries (Chapter 7). The analyses focus on 6–9-year-old primary school children from two longitudinal multi-informant studies in Switzerland (N = 265) and the UK (N = 102), and an added cross-sectional teacher report study in the UK (N = 105). Data on various measures, including questionnaires, classroom observations, interviews, and cognitive tasks, were collected. According to the results, the new teacher report on sensitivity predicts children’s emotion recognition skills, lower error rates in a visual search task, and various socioemotional characteristics in school. Additionally, the UK findings showed teacher-reported sensitivity to predict internalising symptoms, particularly in classrooms with lower emotional and instructional support. Parent and child reports on sensitivity were less informative of children’s school outcomes except for a positive association between child-reported sensitivity and visual working memory, highlighting the importance of a context-relevant informant. Future directions and practical implications are discussed.