Electrodermal Reactivity Moderates the Prospective Association Between Peer Victimization and Depressive Symptoms in Early Adolescence

Distinct physiological responses to social-evaluative stress in patients with major depressive disorder reporting a history of peer victimization

Peer victimization is a risk factor for the development of major depressive disorders, but little is known about the mechanisms. This study examined whether peer victimization alters physiological and affective responses to potentially threatening social stimuli. For this purpose, reactions to socially evaluative stimuli of depressive patients and healthy controls with varying histories of peer victimization were compared. In a social conditioning task, we studied heart rate responses to unconditioned socially negative and neutral evaluative video statements, followed by the heart rate reactions to conditioned stimuli, i.e. still images of the faces of the same actors. Diagnosis of depression and peer victimization were both associated with a more pronounced heart rate deceleration in response to unconditioned stimuli, irrespective of valence. The effect of peer victimization was stronger in depressive patients than in healthy controls. However, heart rate responses to the CSs were not related to depression or peer victimization. The results indicate a hypervigilant processing of social stimuli in depressive patients reporting histories of peer victimization. This distinct processing may be associated with inappropriate behavioral and emotional responses to social challenges, putting individuals at risk for depressive symptoms.

Mindful Coping Power Effects on Children's Autonomic Nervous System Functioning and Long-Term Behavioral Outcomes

Mindful Coping Power (MCP) was developed to enhance the effects of the Coping Power (CP) preventive intervention on children's reactive aggression by integrating mindfulness training into CP. In prior pre-post analyses in a randomized trial of 102 children, MCP improved children's self-reported anger modulation, self-regulation, and embodied awareness relative to CP but had fewer comparative effects on parent- and teacher-reported observable behavioral outcomes, including reactive aggression. It was hypothesized that MCP-produced improvements in children's internal awareness and self-regulation, if maintained or strengthened over time with ongoing mindfulness practice, would yield improvements in children's observable prosocial and reactive aggressive behavior at later time points. To appraise this hypothesis, the current study examined teacher-reported child behavioral outcomes at a one-year follow-up. In the current subsample of 80 children with one-year follow-up data, MCP produced a significant improvement in children's social skills and a statistical trend for a reduction in reactive aggression compared with CP. Further, MCP produced improvements in children's autonomic nervous system functioning compared with CP from pre- to post-intervention, with a significant effect on children's skin conductance reactivity during an arousal task. Mediation analyses found that MCP-produced improvements in inhibitory control at post-intervention mediated program effects on reactive aggression at the one-year follow-up. Within-person analyses with the full sample (MCP and CP) found that improvements in respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity were associated with improvements in reactive aggression at the one-year follow-up. Together, these findings indicate that MCP is an important new preventive tool to improve embodied awareness, self-regulation, stress physiology, and observable long-term behavioral outcomes in at-risk youth. Further, children's inhibitory control and autonomic nervous system functioning emerged as key targets for preventive intervention.

School-aged children with higher anxiety symptoms show greater correspondence between subjective negative emotions and autonomic arousal

Individuals exhibit variability in the degree of correspondence between autonomic and subjective indicators of emotional experience. The current study examined whether convergence between autonomic arousal and negative emotions during emotion-inducing story vignettes is associated with internalizing symptoms in school-aged children. A diverse sample of 97 children aged 8 to 12 years participated in this study in which they reported on their anxiety and depression. Children's electrodermal activity was assessed while they read vignettes depicting children experiencing sadness and fear. Participants also reported on their emotional reaction to the vignettes. Children's anxiety and electrodermal activity to fear vignettes were associated only at high levels, but not mean or low levels, of self-reported negative emotions to fear vignettes. These findings suggest that hyperawareness, in which self-reported negative emotionality is high when physiological reactivity is also high, is associated with greater risk for anxiety, but not depression, during middle childhood.

Effects of Autonomic Nervous System Functioning and Tornado Exposure on Long-Term Outcomes of Aggressive Children

This study examined whether pre-disaster indicators of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity moderated the relation between degree of disaster exposure from an EF-4 tornado and changes in the externalizing and internalizing behavior problems of children at-risk for aggression. Participants included 188 children in 4th-6th grades (65% male; 78% African American; ages 9-13) and their parents from predominantly low-income households who were participating in a prevention study when the tornado occurred in 2011. Fourth-grade children who exhibited elevated levels of aggressive behavior were recruited in three annual cohorts. Parent-rated externalizing and internalizing problems were assessed prior to the tornado (Wave 1; W1), and at 4-12 months (W2), 16-24 months (W3), 42-28 months (W4) and 56-60 months (W5) post-tornado. Children's pre-tornado Skin Conductance Level (SCL) reactivity and Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) withdrawal were assessed at W1 using SCL and RSA measured during resting baseline and during the first 5 min of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Children and parents reported their exposure to tornado-related trauma and disruptions at Wave 3. Children displayed less reduction in externalizing problems if there had been higher child- or parent-reported tornado exposure and less RSA withdrawal, or if they had lower parent-reported TORTE and less SCL reactivity or lower SCL baseline. Highlighting the importance of children's pre-disaster arousal, higher levels of disaster exposure negatively affected children's level of improvement in externalizing problems when children had less vagal withdrawal, and when tornado exposure disrupted the protective effects of higher SCL reactivity and higher SCL baseline.

Dimensions of adversity in association with adolescents' depression symptoms: Distinct moderating roles of cognitive and autonomic function

Exposure to adverse events is prevalent among youths and robustly associated with risk for depression, particularly during adolescence. The Dimensional Model of Adversity and Psychopathology (DMAP) distinguishes between adverse events that expose youths to deprivation versus threat, positing unique mechanisms of risk (cognitive functioning deficits for deprivation, and altered fear and emotion learning for threat) that may require different approaches to intervention. We examined whether deprivation and threat were distinctly associated with behavioral measures of cognitive processes and autonomic nervous system function in relation to depression symptom severity in a community sample of early adolescents (n = 117; mean age 12.73 years; 54.7% male). Consistent with DMAP, associations between threat and depression symptoms, and between economic deprivation and depression symptoms, were distinctly moderated by physiological and cognitive functions, respectively, at baseline but not follow-up. Under conditions of greater cognitive inhibition, less exposure to deprivation was associated with lower symptom severity. Under conditions of blunted resting-state autonomic response (electrodermal activity and respiratory sinus arrhythmia), greater exposure to threat was associated with higher symptom severity. Our findings support the view that understanding risk for youth depression requires parsing adversity: examining distinct roles played by deprivation and threat, and the associated cognitive and biological processes.

Parenting, deviant peer affiliation, and externalizing behavior during adolescence: processes conditional on sympathetic nervous system reactivity

BACKGROUND

This study examined associations between permissive parenting, deviant peer affiliations, and externalizing behavior across mid to late adolescence in a plausible indirect effects model of change over time with deviant peer affiliation serving as the mediator. We also evaluated potential conditional indirect effects wherein these relationships may be moderated by sex and sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity, indexed by skin conductance level (SCL) reactivity.

METHOD

Participants included 242 community-sampled adolescents (M = 15.79 years; 48% boys; 66% European American, 34% African American) with two additional longitudinal assessments lagged by 1 year. Permissive parenting, SCL reactivity, and sex were considered as time invariant predictors of repeated measures of deviant peer affiliation and externalizing behavior in latent growth models that tested whether any of the direct or indirect associations were conditional on sex or SCL reactivity.

RESULTS

Evidence was found for indirect effects of permissive parenting on externalizing behavior via deviant peer affiliation, but only for males with lower SCL reactivity to stress. Additionally, these effects were found on latent intercepts, but not slopes indexing change over time, perhaps reflecting established individual differences in relationships among these variables.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings are discussed in the context of biosocial models of adolescent development and risk factors that may inform interventions for vulnerable youth.

Blunted Physiological Stress Reactivity among Youth with a History of Bullying and Victimization: Links to Depressive Symptoms

Bullying and peer victimization are stressful experiences for youth, and are associated with increased risk for psychopathology. Physiological differences in the body's stress response system may help us to understand vulnerability for depressive symptoms among youth involved with bullying. The current study examined both sympathetic and parasympathetic activity using skin conductance (SCL) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) at a neutral baseline and during Cyberball, a stressful social exclusion paradigm. Participants consisted of 175 youth in grades 6-11 (mean age 13.6 years, 51% girls). Multilevel modeling was used to examine changes in both positive and negative affect, and physiological stress reactivity over time. Logistic regression was used to examine the associations between bullying, victimization, and RSA on depressive symptoms. Peer victimization was negatively associated with resting RSA. Bullying others was negatively associated with SCL during Cyberball. Additionally, RSA reactivity during acute stress moderated the link between victimization and depressive symptoms. Victimization was more strongly associated with depressive symptoms when youth also demonstrated blunted RSA reactivity. These results suggest that both victimized youth and those who bully others have differences in their autonomic responses to acute stress. Individual differences in stress physiology may help us to understand vulnerability and resilience to depressive symptoms in the context of bullying and victimization.

Parental management of peers and autonomic nervous system reactivity in predicting adolescent peer relationships

The present study examined sympathetic and parasympathetic indices of autonomic nervous system reactivity as moderators of the prospective association between parental management of peers via directing of youths' friendships and peer adjustment in a sample of typically developing adolescents. Participants included 246 adolescents at Time 1 (T1) [47% boys; 66% European American (EA), 34% African American (AA)] and 226 adolescents at Time 2 (T2; 45% boys; 67% EA, 33% AA). Adolescents were approximately 16 and 17 years old at T1 and T2, respectively. To address study aims, a multiinformant, multimethod longitudinal design was utilized. Skin conductance level (SCL) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were measured during a baseline period and challenge task (star-tracing). Reactivity was computed as a difference score between the task and baseline period. Results from path models revealed that higher levels of mother-reported parental directing predicted decreases in adolescent-reported peer rejection and friends' deviant behavior from T1 to T2 at relatively low levels of physiological arousal in response to challenge (i.e., low SCL reactivity, RSA augmentation). Further, exploratory analyses indicated that directing was associated with decreases in friends' deviant behavior and peer rejection particularly among boys who exhibited lower levels of physiological arousal, but increases in friends' deviant behavior among boys who exhibited higher levels of arousal reflected in RSA withdrawal only. Overall, findings are consistent with prior studies revealing the benefits of parental behavioral control for underaroused youth, contributing to the growing literature on the interplay of parenting and physiological factors in the adolescent peer domain. (PsycINFO Database Record