Abstract: For a long time, the need for belongingness has been considered as one of the most important basic human needs. Peer interactions make important and unique contributions to children's social, emotional, cognitive, and moral development (Rubin, Bukowski, & Bowker, 2015), and Lacking it may cause mental illness and maladjustment (Rubin, Coplan, & Bowker, 2009). However, socially withdrawn children habitually remove themselves from opportunities for peer interaction. In order to better understand this group of children, Asendorpf (1990) proposed a conceptual model postulating different child psychosocial outcomes as a function of social approach and social avoidance motivations. According to this model, avoidant children were portrayed as both desiring being solitude and actively seeking to avoid social interaction, whom were consequently at the most risk for social and emotional maladjustment. Although very little is known about social avoidance in childhood (Coplan et al. 2015), three postulations hypothesize the processes that may underlie the development of avoidant children (Asendorpf, 1990; Bowker & Raja, 2011; Chen, 2010; Coplan & Armer 2007; Coplan et al., 2015; Rubin et al., 2009; Schmidt & Fox, 1999), which are social anxiety, negative peer experiences and depression. However, there has been very limited empirical study of social avoidance to compare those three conceptual models directly. To our knowledge, only one study using short-term longitudinal design examined those hypotheses, and provided evidence supporting depressive symptoms as a salient predictor of social avoidance (Ding et al., 2018). Two approaches are available to measure social avoidance. One indirect approach is to select avoidant children based on the model of social motivations. Researchers speculated that children characterized by low approach motivation and high avoidance motivation would be defined as socially avoidant children according to Asendorpf (1990) before. The other direct approach for measurement on social avoidance, researcher used self-reported or parental-reported Social Avoidance Scale to test the level of avoidance directly.

Key words: social avoidance, social withdrawal, peer relationship, adjustment functioning

摘要： 社会退缩行为是指儿童在社会情境中抑制自己参与同伴互动并表现出独处的行为。根据不同的社交动机，社会退缩行为包含多种亚类型，其中社交回避行为这一亚类型指儿童总是表现出主动避免各种社交场合的行为。总体而言，社交回避是目前研究最少的一种，其形成的主要原因可能是由于儿童本身较高的抑郁感所致，而研究者已开始尝试以间接和直接的方式测量其水平。来自以变量为中心和以个体为中心的研究分别表明，社交回避儿童面临着最高的适应风险。鉴于这一研究领域的广泛前景，未来的研究亟需关注社交回避影响儿童适应的过程机制及其年龄发展特点，测量工具的进一步开发，直接的跨文化比较以及社交回避的干预方案开发。

关键词: 社交回避, 社会退缩, 同伴关系, 适应功能