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Creators/Authors contains: "Rudd, Kristen L."

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  1. ; ( , Psychophysiology)
    Abstract

    Children's self‐regulation is a core adaptive system in child development. Physiological indices of regulation, particularly the autonomic nervous system (ANS), have garnered increased attention as an informative level of analysis in regulation research. Cardiography supports the simultaneous examination of both ANS branches via measures of pre‐ejection period (PEP) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) as indicators of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, respectively. However, despite their heavily intertwined functions, research examining autonomic coordination across sympathetic and parasympathetic systems is scarce. Moreover, extant efforts have favored static, mean level reactivity analyses, despite the dynamic nature of ANS regulation and the availability of analytic tools that can model these processes across time. This study drew on a sample of 198 six‐year‐old children from a diverse community sample (49.5% female, 43.9% Latinx) to examine dynamic autonomic coordination using bivariate latent change score modeling to evaluate bidirectional influences of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity over the course of a challenging puzzle completion task. Results indicated that children evidenced reciprocal sympathetic activation (i.e., PEP attenuation and RSA withdrawal) across the challenge task, and these regulatory responses were characterized by a temporally leading influence of PEP on lagging changes in RSA. The current findings contribute to our understanding of children's autonomic coordination while illustrating a novel analytic technique to advance ongoing efforts to understand the etiology and developmental significance of children's physiological self‐regulation.

     
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  2. ; ; ( , Brain and Behavior)
    Abstract Introduction

    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.

     Methods

    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.

     Results

    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.

     Conclusions

    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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  3. ; ( , Developmental Psychobiology)