Challenging behaviors significantly impact learning and socialization of autistic children and can stress and burden their caregivers. Documentation of challenging behaviors is fundamental for identifying what environmental factors influence them, such as how others respond to a child's such behaviors. Caregiver-tracked data on their child's challenging behaviors can help clinical experts make informed recommendations about how to manage such behaviors. To support caregivers in recording their children's challenging behaviors, we developed GeniAuti, a mobile-based data-collection tool built upon a clinical data collection form to document challenging behaviors and other clinically relevant contextual information such as place, duration, intensity, and what triggers such behaviors. Through an open-ended deployment with 19 parent-child pairs and three expert collaborators, caregivers found GeniAuti valuable for (1) becoming more attentive and reflective to behavioral contexts, including their own response strategies, (2) discovering positive aspects of their children's behaviors, and (3) promoting collaboration with clinical experts around the caregiver-tracked data to develop tailored intervention strategies for their children. However, participant experiences surface challenges of logging behaviors in social circumstances, conflicting views between caregivers and clinical experts around the structured recording process, and emotional struggles resulting from recording and reflecting on intensely negative experiences. Considering the complex nature of caregiver-based health tracking and caregiver--clinician collaboration, we suggest design opportunities for facilitating negotiations between caregivers and clinicians and accounting for caregivers' emotional needs.
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Caregivers’ positive emotion socialization tendencies are associated with positive affect in preschool age children
Longstanding theories of emotion socialization postulate that caregiver emotional and behavioral reactions to a child's emotions together shape the child's emotion displays over time. Despite the notable importance of positive valence system function, the majority of research on caregiver emotion socialization focuses on negative valence system emotions. In the current project, we leveraged a relatively large cross‐sectional study of caregivers (
- Award ID(s):
- 2042285
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10398865
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Infant Mental Health Journal
- Volume:
- 44
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0163-9641
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 437-447
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Caregivers who are higher in dispositional empathy tend to have children with better developmental outcomes; however, few studies have considered the role of child‐directed (i.e., “parental”) empathy, which may be relevant for the caregiver–child relationship. We hypothesized that mothers’ parental empathy during their child's infancy will be a stronger predictor of their child's social‐emotional functioning as a toddler than will mothers’ dispositional empathy. We further explored whether parental and dispositional empathy have shared or distinct patterns of neural activation during a social‐cognitive movie‐watching task. In 118 mother–infant dyads, greater parental empathy assessed when infants were 6 months old was associated with more social‐emotional competencies and fewer problems in the children 1 year later, even after adjusting for dispositional empathy. In contrast, dispositional empathy was not associated with child functioning when controlling for parental empathy. In a subset of 20 mothers, insula activation was positively associated with specific facets of both dispositional and parental empathy, whereas right temporoparietal junction activation was associated only with parental empathy. Thus, dispositional and parental empathy appear to be dissociable by both brain and behavioral metrics. Parental empathy may be a viable target for interventions, especially for toddlers at risk for developing social‐emotional difficulties.
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Abstract Interoception, often defined as the perception of internal physiological changes, is implicated in many adult social affective processes, but its effects remain understudied in the context of parental socialization of children's emotions. We hypothesized that what parents know about the interoceptive concomitants of emotions, or
interoceptive knowledge (e.g., “my heart races when excited”), may be especially relevant in emotion socialization and in supporting children's working models of emotions and the social world. We developed a measure of mothers' interoceptive knowledge about their own emotions and examined its relation to children's social affective outcomes relative to other socialization factors, including self‐reported parental behaviors, emotion beliefs, and knowledge of emotion‐relevant situations and non‐verbal expressions. To assess these, mothers (N = 201) completed structured interviews and questionnaires. A few months later, third‐grade teachers rated children's social skills and emotion regulation observed in the classroom. Results indicated that mothers' interoceptive knowledge about their own emotions was associated with children's social affective skills (emotion regulation, social initiative, cooperation, self‐control), even after controlling for child gender and ethnicity, family income, maternal stress, and the above maternal socialization factors. Overall, findings suggest that mothers' interoceptive knowledge may provide an additional, unique pathway by which children acquire social affective competence. -
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Abstract Are children from “Eastern” cultures less emotionally expressive and reactive than children from “Western” cultures? To answer this, we used a multi‐level and multi‐contextual approach to understand variations in emotion displays and cortisol reactivity among preschoolers living in China and the United States. One hundred two preschoolers from China (
N = 58; 55% males) and the United States (N = 44, 48% males) completed three (i.e., control, interpersonal‐related, and achievement‐related) emotion‐challenging paradigms over 3 days. Behavioral emotion expressions were coded, and salivary cortisol was sampled 30 minutes before and across 90 minutes post‐task. Without considering context, Chinese preschoolers displayed fewer levels of positive and negative emotion expressions relative to their United States counterparts. However, Chinese preschoolers displayed similar levels of expressions as their United States counterparts during an achievement‐related challenge that is more salient to their sociocultural emphases and showed higher negative emotion expressions in this challenge, relative to other contexts. Moreover, only the achievement‐related challenge elicited increased cortisol levels among Chinese preschoolers, and this was correlated with higher levels of negative expressions. For US preschoolers, no cortisol increase was observed in any challenging paradigms, nor was cortisol associated with emotional expressions. Findings counter prior notions that East Asian children are generally less emotionally expressive. Instead, an achievement‐related challenge elicited higher emotion expression and cortisol reactivity among Chinese preschoolers, suggesting that children's emotion expression and biological reactivity may be most responsive to contexts salient to their socio‐cultural environments. We discuss the importance of considering cultural contexts when studying emotion regulation.RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS Chinese preschoolers displayed lower overall positive and negative expressions relative to their US counterparts without considering situational contexts.
Chinese preschoolers displayed similar levels of emotion expressions as their US counterparts during an achievement‐related challenge salient to their social‐cultural environment.
Chinese preschoolers are particularly responsive to achievement‐related challenges, relative to other emotion‐challenging situations that are less culturally salient.
No cortisol increase was observed in any of the emotion‐challenging paradigms among US preschoolers.
Children's emotion expression and biological reactivity may be most responsive to challenges relevant to their socio‐cultural environments.
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Inferring emotions from others’ non-verbal behavior is a pervasive and fundamental task in social interactions. Typically, real-life encounters imply the co-location of interactants, i.e., their embodiment within a shared spatial-temporal continuum in which the trajectories of the interaction partner’s Expressive Body Movement (EBM) create mutual social affordances. Shared Virtual Environments (SVEs) and Virtual Characters (VCs) are increasingly used to study social perception, allowing to reconcile experimental stimulus control with ecological validity. However, it remains unclear whether display modalities that enable co-presence have an impact on observers responses to VCs’ expressive behaviors. Drawing upon ecological approaches to social perception, we reasoned that sharing the space with a VC should amplify affordances as compared to a screen display, and consequently alter observers’ perceptions of EBM in terms of judgment certainty, hit rates, perceived expressive qualities (arousal and valence), and resulting approach and avoidance tendencies. In a between-subject design, we compared the perception of 54 10-s animations of VCs performing three daily activities (painting, mopping, sanding) in three emotional states (angry, happy, sad)—either displayed in 3D as a co-located VC moving in shared space, or as a 2D replay on a screen that was also placed in the SVEs. Results confirm the effective experimental control of the variable of interest, showing that perceived co-presence was significantly affected by the display modality, while perceived realism and immersion showed no difference. Spatial presence and social presence showed marginal effects. Results suggest that the display modality had a minimal effect on emotion perception. A weak effect was found for the expression “happy,” for which unbiased hit rates were higher in the 3D condition. Importantly, low hit rates were observed for all three emotion categories. However, observers judgments significantly correlated for category assignment and across all rating dimensions, indicating universal decoding principles. While category assignment was erroneous, though, ratings of valence and arousal were consistent with expectations derived from emotion theory. The study demonstrates the value of animated VCs in emotion perception studies and raises new questions regarding the validity of category-based emotion recognition measures.
