Shy toddlers act bold: The roles of respiratory sinus arrhythmia and parent emotion language

Childhood conduct problems and parent-child talk during social and nonsocial play contexts: a naturalistic home-based experiment

Parent-child interactions are a critical pathway to emotion socialization, with disruption to these processes associated with risk for childhood behavior problems. Using computational linguistics methods, we tested whether (1) play context influenced parent-child socioemotional language, and (2) child conduct problems or callous-unemotional traits were associated with patterns of socioemotional or nonsocial language across contexts. Seventy-nine parent-child dyads (children, 5-6 years old) played a socioemotional skills ("social context") or math ("nonsocial context") game at home. We transcribed and analyzed game play, which had been audio recorded by participants. The social context elicited more socioemotional and cognitive words, while the nonsocial context elicited more mathematical words. The use of socioemotional language by parents and children was more strongly correlated in the social context, but context did not moderate the degree of correlation in cognitive or mathematical word use between parents and children. Children with more conduct problems used fewer socioemotional words in the social context, while children with higher callous-unemotional traits used fewer cognitive words in both contexts. We highlight the role of context in supporting socioemotionally rich parent-child language interactions and provide preliminary evidence for the existence of linguistic markers of child behavior problems. Our results also inform naturalistic assessments of parent-child interactions and home-based interventions for parents and children facing socioemotional or behavioral challenges.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of the association between parenting and child autonomic nervous system activity

Parental socialization may influence the development of children's autonomic nervous system (ANS), a key stress-response system. However, to date no quantitative synthesis of the literature linking parenting and child ANS physiology has been conducted. To address this gap, we conducted a pre-registered meta-analysis. A systematic review of the literature identified 103 studies (n = 13,044 participants) with available effect sizes describing the association between parenting and either parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) or sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity in children. The overall analysis revealed non-significant associations between parenting and child ANS physiology on average. However, moderation analyses revealed a positive association between more positive parenting and higher resting PNS activity that was stronger when a study was experimental rather than correlational, and when the sample included children with a clinical condition. In conclusion, well-controlled experimental studies show that positive parenting is associated with the development of higher resting PNS activity, an effect that may be stronger among children who are at elevated developmental risk.

Associations between acoustic features of maternal speech and infants' emotion regulation following a social stressor

Caregiver voices may provide cues to mobilize or calm infants. This study examined whether maternal prosody predicted changes in infants' biobehavioral state after the still face, a stressor in which the mother withdraws and reinstates social engagement. Ninety-four dyads participated in the study (infant age 4-8 months). Infants' heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (measuring cardiac vagal tone) were derived from an electrocardiogram (ECG). Infants' behavioral distress was measured by negative vocalizations, facial expressions, and gaze aversion. Mothers' vocalizations were measured via a composite of spectral analysis and spectro-temporal modulation using a two-dimensional fast Fourier transformation of the audio spectrogram. High values on the maternal prosody composite were associated with decreases in infants' heart rate (β = -.26, 95% CI: [-0.46, -0.05]) and behavioral distress (β = -.23, 95% CI: [-0.42, -0.03]), and increases in cardiac vagal tone in infants whose vagal tone was low during the stressor (1 SD below mean β = .39, 95% CI: [0.06, 0.73]). High infant heart rate predicted increases in the maternal prosody composite (β = .18, 95% CI: [0.03, 0.33]). These results suggest specific vocal acoustic features of speech that are relevant for regulating infants' biobehavioral state and demonstrate mother-infant bi-directional dynamics.

Characterizing change in vagal tone during the first three years of life: A systematic review and empirical examination across two longitudinal samples

Functioning of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), most often indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), influences the volitional, cognitively-mediated forms of self-regulation across development. However, despite its clear relevance to children's self-regulation, and its utility as a transdiagnostic biomarker of emotion dysregulation and psychopathology, the ontogeny of vagal tone under conditions of homeostasis across infancy and early childhood is not well understood. The current research is comprised of two complementary studies. The first aims to address this gap by conducting a systematic review of the literature which has assessed resting RSA in the first three years of life. The second study uses data from two diverse, longitudinal datasets (n = 203 and n = 370) to model change in RSA from infancy to toddlerhood. Results from a systematic review of 62 studies meeting inclusion criteria suggest that measures of resting RSA increase over time and demonstrate moderate stability across infancy, toddlerhood, and preschool ages. Results from a series of models fit to longitudinal data in study two suggest that baseline RSA is characterized by stable increases across infancy and early childhood. Moreover, although there was equivocal evidence for individual variability in trajectories of RSA, the findings suggest that the individual differences in resting RSA may become entrenched in early life based on observed significant variance in growth model intercepts. In all, the current study contributes to our understanding of the developmental trajectories of baseline RSA across infancy and early childhood and should support future research examining links between children's parasympathetic regulation and their adjustment in early life.

Language and socioemotional development in early childhood: The role of conversational turns

This study examines the role of language environment (number of conversational turns) in the development of socioemotional competencies between 18 and 30 months. The language environment of 43 infants and their social-emotional competencies were measured at 18 months and again at 30 months. Multiple regressions showed a significant contribution of turns at 18 months on socioemotional competencies at 30 months, controlling for their initial levels, child vocalizations, maternal warmth, and social risk. Cross-lagged analysis revealed that the direction of the longitudinal relation between turns and emotional competencies is more likely to go from turns to socioemotional development than the other way around. Implications for theory and research are discussed.

Emotion talk in Chinese American immigrant families and longitudinal links to children's socioemotional competence

Parent emotion talk (ET), a type of emotion-related socialization practice, is theorized to foster children's emotion-related regulation and socioemotional skills. Yet, there has been limited research linking parent ET to children's effortful control, a top-down regulatory process. Despite the observed cultural differences in ET between Chinese and European American families, few researchers tested whether the socioemotional benefits of ET are generalizable to Chinese American families, an immigrant group with contrasting values in their heritage and host cultures. The present study examined Chinese American parents' ET, its associations with sociocultural factors, and prospective relations to school-age children's effortful control, sympathy, and socially appropriate behaviors. In a two-wave (1.5 years apart) longitudinal study of first- and second-generation Chinese American children (N = 258, age = 6-9 years at Wave 1, 52% from low-income families), the content and quality of parent ET (e.g., the overall quality of emotion talk, frequency of emotion explanations, emotion questions, and number of emotion words) was coded from a video-recorded shared book reading task. Children's effortful control, sympathy, and social behaviors were rated by parents, teachers, and children. Results showed that the Chinese American parents from lower socioeconomic status families, families with lower English proficiency, or more recent immigrants displayed lower ET. Parent ET was prospectively related to children's higher effortful control after controlling for stability, and higher effortful control was concurrently associated with children's higher sympathy and more socially appropriate behaviors. The findings provide empirical support for the socioemotional benefits of ET for school-age children in Chinese American immigrant families. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).