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1. Children's physiological reactivity in emotion contexts and prosocial behavior

   https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.1380  

   Coulombe, Brianne R. ; Rudd, Kristen L. ; Yates, Tuppett M. ( September 2019 , Brain and Behavior)

   Building on prior evidence that prosocial behavior is related to the regulation of personal distress in difficult situations, and given that physiological regulation is a central contributor to effective emotion regulation, this investigation evaluated whether and how children's autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity during emotion challenges influenced later expressions of prosocial behavior.

   The current study utilized a diverse sample of school‐aged children (N = 169; 47.9% female; 47.3% Latinx) to evaluate relations between children's parasympathetic (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) and sympathetic (i.e., pre‐ejection period; PEP) reactivity in response to each of three film‐elicited emotion challenges (i.e., sadness, happiness, and fear) at age 7 and both observed and parent‐reported prosocial behavior one year later.

   Children's parasympathetic reactivity to a film eliciting sadness evidenced a nonlinear relation with later prosocial sharing such that children who evidenced either RSA withdrawal or augmentation in response to the sad emotion challenge engaged in higher levels of prosocial behavior than children who evidenced relatively low or absent reactivity. Parasympathetic reactivity to films eliciting happiness or fear was not significantly related to later prosocial behavior. Likewise, children's sympathetic reactivity in response to the emotion challenges did not significantly predict later prosocial behavior.

   These findings provide preliminary support for a nonlinear association between children's parasympathetic emotion reactivity and later prosocial behavior, and suggest that children's ANS regulation in sad emotion contexts may be particularly important for understanding prosocial development.

    

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2. Linking autonomic physiology and emotion regulation in preschoolers: The role of reactivity and recovery

   https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.21746  

   Kahle, Sarah ; Miller, Jonas G. ; Helm, Jonathan L. ; Hastings, Paul D. ( June 2018 , Developmental Psychobiology)

   Physiological recovery from negative emotions may be important for effective self‐regulation, but little is known about recovery processes in children. The current study investigated links between autonomic physiology, anger expressions, and emotion regulation in a sample of eighty‐three 3.5‐year‐olds. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia and pre‐ejection period were measured during an anger induction task as parasympathetic and sympathetic indices, respectively. We examined whether preschoolers’ anger expressions and emotion regulation behaviors were associated with individual differences in physiology. Autonomic changes were more strongly linked with emotion regulation than with expressed anger. Verbalized regulatory strategies were linked with greater sympathetic reactivity and also with greater recovery. In contrast, attention diversion was associated with blunted patterns of sympathetic reactivity followed by increased sympathetic arousal in the recovery phase. Disengaging from an emotional challenge may be linked with reduced physiological arousal in the short term, this behavior but also appears to have delayed consequences for physiological recovery.

    

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3. Mother–child mutually responsive orientation and real‐time physiological coordination

   https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.22200  

   Hu, Yannan ; McElwain, Nancy L. ; Berry, Daniel ( October 2021 , Developmental Psychobiology)

   From a biobehavioral framework, mother–child physiological and behavioral coordination are interdependent processes that contribute to children's socioemotional development. Little is known, however, about the temporal pattern of real‐time physiological coordination or its associations with global levels of mother–child behavioral coordination. We addressed these gaps using data from 110 mothers and their preschool‐aged children (56 girls,M_age = 53.63 months,SD = 7.74) across two play tasks (i.e., puzzle, pretend play). Using indices of maternal and child parasympathetic response (i.e., changes in respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) across 15‐s epochs, we tested the extent to which within‐dyad physiological coordination was contingent on mutually responsive orientation (MRO; a global composite of behavioral coordination and shared positive affect assessed via observer ratings across each play task). Results from a series of two‐level coupled autoregressive models indicated that MRO moderated mother–lead RSA coordination, and this pattern emerged across both play tasks. Controlling for stability of within‐person RSA changes, increases in maternal RSA at timet – 1 predicted increases in children's RSA at timet, but only for dyads averaging higher MRO during play. No interactions of MRO emerged for child–lead RSA coordination. Findings highlight the importance of dyadic behavioral processes for mother–child physiological coordination.

    

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4. Close TIES in relationships: A dynamic systems approach for modeling physiological linkage

   https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075221082594  

   Kuelz, Ashley ; Boyd, Savannah ; Butler, Emily ( October 2022 , Journal of Social and Personal Relationships)

   We explore complex dynamic patterns of autonomic physiological linkage (i.e., statistical interdependence of partner’s physiology; PL), within the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems (SNS and PNS), as potential correlates of emotional and regulatory dynamics in close relationships. We include electrodermal activity (EDA) as an indicator of SNS activation and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) as an indicator of regulatory and/or homeostatic processes within the PNS. Measures of EDA and RSA were collected in 10-second increments from 53 heterosexual couples during a mixed-emotion conversation in the laboratory. We used the R statistical package, rties (Butler & Barnard, 2019), to model the dynamics of EDA and RSA with a coupled oscillator model and then categorized couples into qualitatively distinct profiles based on the set of parameters that emerged. We identified two patterns for EDA and three patterns for RSA. We then investigated associations between the PL patterns and self-report measures of relationship and conversation quality and emotional valence using Bayesian multilevel and logistic regression models. Overall, we found robust results indicating that PL profiles were credibly predicted by valence and relationship quality reported prior to the conversations. In contrast, we found very little evidence suggesting that PL patterns predict self-reported conversation quality or valence following the conversation. Together, these results suggest that PL across autonomic subsystems may reflect different processes and therefore have different implications when considering interpersonal dynamics. 

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5. Parasympathetic response to challenge in infancy moderates the effects of sociodemographic risk on academic achievement at school entry

   https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.22170  

   Propper, Cathi B. ; Gustafsson, Hanna C. ; Holochwost, Steven J. ; Coffman, Jennifer L. ( July 2021 , Developmental Psychobiology)

   Exposure to higher levels of sociodemographic risk is associated with lower levels of academic achievement among young children. However, there is variability in the strength of this association, which may be traced to individual differences in physiological processes underlying self‐regulation. In the current study, we examined whether the response of the parasympathetic nervous system to challenge, indexed by change in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), moderated the association between risk and school readiness at 5 years of age in a diverse sample of young children. We found that parasympathetic response to the Still‐Face Paradigm moderated the effects of risk on a measure of school readiness, such that there was no association between risk and school readiness among children who exhibited RSA decreases during challenge at 6 months of age, a purported index of self‐regulation at this age. For those infants who did not exhibit RSA withdrawal during this challenge, exposure to early cumulative risk was associated with lower scores on achievement assessment. These results speak to the possibility that certain patterns of parasympathetic response can serve as a protective factor for young children growing up in disadvantaged environments.

    

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