When ways of thinking and acting misalign: A longitudinal study of childhood social compensation in the community

Some individuals may compensate for their underlying social cognitive vulnerabilities, therefore exhibiting adaptive real-world social behavior through enhanced attentional mechanisms despite underlying social cognitive challenges. From a developmental psychopathology framework, adaptive behaviors vary dimensionally in the community and across development to promote compensation. Yet, compensation in the broader community of children without categorical clinical diagnoses has not yet been studied. Moreover, the extent to which compensation demonstrates stability versus change is unknown. This study examines childhood social compensation longitudinally in a community-ascertained sample (N = 315) of 7–17 year-old (M = 12.15, SD = 2.97) children (33% non-white, 44% female). Compared to children with equally poor emotion recognition but substantially more real-world social behavior challenges, high compensators demonstrated better attentional alerting (d = 0.81, p < 0.001) without the “cost” of internalizing symptoms. Results showed both stability and instability in compensation group membership over time, with the high compensation group more likely to have unstable classification relative to the no compensation group (OR = 0.26, p = 0.001). Taken together, this study clarifies the processes underlying social compensation in the community and suggests a developmental psychopathology perspective is valuable in understanding how compensation develops across the lifespan. Such work has the potential to inform practices and policies that support social adaptation and promote resilience.