Anxious parents show higher physiological synchrony with their infants

BACKGROUND

Interpersonal processes influence our physiological states and associated affect. Physiological arousal dysregulation, a core feature of anxiety disorders, has been identified in children of parents with elevated anxiety. However, little is understood about how parent-infant interpersonal regulatory processes differ when the dyad includes a more anxious parent.

METHODS

We investigated moment-to-moment fluctuations in arousal within parent-infant dyads using miniaturised microphones and autonomic monitors. We continually recorded arousal and vocalisations in infants and parents in naturalistic home settings across day-long data segments.

RESULTS

Our results indicated that physiological synchrony across the day was stronger in dyads including more rather than less anxious mothers. Across the whole recording epoch, less anxious mothers showed responsivity that was limited to 'peak' moments in their child's arousal. In contrast, more anxious mothers showed greater reactivity to small-scale fluctuations. Less anxious mothers also showed behaviours akin to 'stress buffering' - downregulating their arousal when the overall arousal level of the dyad was high. These behaviours were absent in more anxious mothers.

CONCLUSION

Our findings have implications for understanding the differential processes of physiological co-regulation in partnerships where a partner is anxious, and for the use of this understanding in informing intervention strategies for dyads needing support for elevated levels of anxiety.

Physiological stress, sustained attention, emotion regulation, and cognitive engagement in 12-month-old infants from urban environments

Over the last 2 centuries there has been a rapid increase in the proportion of children who grow up in cities. However, relatively little work has explored in detail the physiological and cognitive pathways through which city life may affect early development. To assess this, we observed a cohort of infants growing up in diverse settings across South East England across a 2-day assessment battery. On Visit 1, day-long home recordings were made to monitor infants' physiological stress in real-world settings. On Visit 2, lab batteries were administered to measure infants' cognitive, emotional, and neural reactivity. Infants from more high-density urban environments showed increased physiological stress (decreased parasympathetic nervous system activity) at home. This relationship was independent of socioeconomic status and lifelong stressors. Behaviorally, infants raised in high-density settings showed lower sustained attention in the lab, along with increased behavioral and physiological reactivity during an emotion elicitation task. However, they also showed increased recognition memory for briefly presented stimuli and increased neural engagement with novel stimuli. This pattern is consistent with other research into how elevated physiological stress influences cognition, and with theoretical approaches from adult research that predict that city life is associated with a profile of cognitive strengths as well as weaknesses. Implications for education and developmental psychopathology are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

In infancy, it's the extremes of arousal that are 'sticky': Naturalistic data challenge purely homeostatic approaches to studying self-regulation

Most theoretical models of arousal/regulatory function emphasise the maintenance of homeostasis; consistent with this, most previous research into arousal has concentrated on examining individuals' recovery following the administration of experimentally administered stressors. Here, we take a different approach: we recorded day-long spontaneous fluctuations in autonomic arousal (indexed via electrocardiogram, heart rate variability and actigraphy) in a cohort of 82 typically developing 12-month-old infants while they were at home and awake. Based on the aforementioned models, we hypothesised that extreme high or low arousal states might be more short-lived than intermediate arousal states. Our results suggested that, contrary to this, both low- and high-arousal states were more persistent than intermediate arousal states. The same pattern was present when the data were viewed over multiple epoch sizes from 1 s to 5 min; over 10-15-minute time-scales, high-arousal states were more persistent than low- and intermediate states. One possible explanation for these findings is that extreme arousal states have intrinsically greater hysteresis; another is that, through 'metastatic' processes, small initial increases and decreases in arousal can become progressively amplified over time. Rather than exclusively using experimental paradigms to study recovery, we argue that future research should also use naturalistic data to study the mechanisms through which states can be maintained or amplified over time.

Influences of environmental stressors on autonomic function in 12-month-old infants: understanding early common pathways to atypical emotion regulation and cognitive performance

BACKGROUND

Previous research has suggested that children exposed to more early-life stress show worse mental health outcomes and impaired cognitive performance in later life, but the mechanisms subserving these relationships remain poorly understood.

METHOD

Using miniaturised microphones and physiological arousal monitors (electrocardiography, heart rate variability and actigraphy), we examined for the first time infants' autonomic reactions to environmental stressors (noise) in the home environment, in a sample of 82 12-month-old infants from mixed demographic backgrounds. The same infants also attended a laboratory testing battery where attention- and emotion-eliciting stimuli were presented. We examined how children's environmental noise exposure levels at home related to their autonomic reactivity and to their behavioural performance in the laboratory.

RESULTS

Individual differences in total noise exposure were independent of other socioeconomic and parenting variables. Children exposed to higher and more rapidly fluctuating environmental noise showed more unstable autonomic arousal patterns overall in home settings. In the laboratory testing battery, this group showed more labile and short-lived autonomic changes in response to novel attention-eliciting stimuli, along with reduced visual sustained attention. They also showed increased arousal lability in response to an emotional stressor.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results offer new insights into the mechanisms by which environmental noise exposure may confer increased risk of adverse mental health and impaired cognitive performance during later life.

Do Helpful Mothers Help? Effects of Maternal Scaffolding and Infant Engagement on Cognitive Performance

Infants are highly social and much early learning takes place in a social context during interactions with caregivers. Previous research shows that social scaffolding - responsive parenting and joint attention - can confer benefits for infants' long-term development and learning. However, little previous research has examined whether dynamic (moment-to-moment) adaptations in adults' social scaffolding are able to produce immediate effects on infants' performance. Here we ask whether infants' success on an object search task is more strongly influenced by maternal behavior, including dynamic changes in response behavior, or by fluctuations in infants' own engagement levels. Thirty-five mother-infant dyads (infants aged 10.8 months, on average) participated in an object search task that was delivered in a naturalistic manner by the child's mother. Measures of maternal responsiveness (teaching duration; sensitivity) and infant engagement (engagement score; visual attention) were assessed. Mothers varied their task delivery trial by trial, but neither measure of maternal responsiveness significantly predicted infants' success in performing the search task. Rather, infants' own level of engagement was the sole significant predictor of accuracy. These results indicate that while parental scaffolding is offered spontaneously (and is undoubtedly crucial for development), in this context children's endogenous engagement proved to be a more powerful determinant of task success. Future work should explore this interplay between parental and child-internal factors in other learning and social contexts.

Parents Mimic and Influence Their Infant's Autonomic State through Dynamic Affective State Matching

When we see someone experiencing an emotion, and when we experience it ourselves, common neurophysiological activity occurs [1, 2]. But although inter-dyadic synchrony, concurrent and sequential [3], has been identified, its functional significance remains inadequately understood. Specifically, how do influences of partner A on partner B reciprocally influence partner A? For example, if I am experiencing an affective state and someone matches their physiological state to mine, what influence does this have on me-the person experiencing the emotion? Here, we investigated this using infant-parent dyads. We developed miniaturized microphones to record spontaneous vocalizations and wireless autonomic monitors to record heart rate, heart rate variability, and movement in infants and parents concurrently in naturalistic settings. Overall, we found that infant-parent autonomic activity did not covary across the day-but that "high points" of infant arousal led to autonomic changes in the parent and that instances where the adult showed greater autonomic responsivity were associated with faster infant quieting. Parental responsivity was higher following peaks in infant negative affect than in positive affect. Overall, parents responded to increases in their child's arousal by increasing their own. However, when the overall arousal level of the dyad was high, parents responded to elevated child arousal by decreasing their own arousal. Our findings suggest that autonomic state matching has a direct effect on the person experiencing the affective state and that parental co-regulation may involve both connecting and disconnecting their own arousal state from that of the child contingent on context.

Parental neural responsivity to infants' visual attention: How mature brains influence immature brains during social interaction

Almost all attention and learning-in particular, most early learning-take place in social settings. But little is known of how our brains support dynamic social interactions. We recorded dual electroencephalography (EEG) from 12-month-old infants and parents during solo play and joint play. During solo play, fluctuations in infants' theta power significantly forward-predicted their subsequent attentional behaviours. However, this forward-predictiveness was lower during joint play than solo play, suggesting that infants' endogenous neural control over attention is greater during solo play. Overall, however, infants were more attentive to the objects during joint play. To understand why, we examined how adult brain activity related to infant attention. We found that parents' theta power closely tracked and responded to changes in their infants' attention. Further, instances in which parents showed greater neural responsivity were associated with longer sustained attention by infants. Our results offer new insights into how one partner influences another during social interaction.

Toward a Neuroscientific Understanding of Play: A Dimensional Coding Framework for Analyzing Infant-Adult Play Patterns

Play during early life is a ubiquitous activity, and an individual’s propensity for play is positively related to cognitive development and emotional well-being. Play behavior (which may be solitary or shared with a social partner) is diverse and multi-faceted. A challenge for current research is to converge on a common definition and measurement system for play – whether examined at a behavioral, cognitive or neurological level. Combining these different approaches in a multimodal analysis could yield significant advances in understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms of play, and provide the basis for developing biologically grounded play models. However, there is currently no integrated framework for conducting a multimodal analysis of play that spans brain, cognition and behavior. The proposed coding framework uses grounded and observable behaviors along three dimensions (sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional), to compute inferences about playful behavior in a social context, and related social interactional states. Here, we illustrate the sensitivity and utility of the proposed coding framework using two contrasting dyadic corpora (N = 5) of mother-infant object-oriented interactions during experimental conditions that were either non-conducive (Condition 1) or conducive (Condition 2) to the emergence of playful behavior. We find that the framework accurately identifies the modal form of social interaction as being either non-playful (Condition 1) or playful (Condition 2), and further provides useful insights about differences in the quality of social interaction and temporal synchronicity within the dyad. It is intended that this fine-grained coding of play behavior will be easily assimilated with, and inform, future analysis of neural data that is also collected during adult–infant play. In conclusion, here, we present a novel framework for analyzing the continuous time-evolution of adult–infant play patterns, underpinned by biologically informed state coding along sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional dimensions. We expect that the proposed framework will have wide utility amongst researchers wishing to employ an integrated, multimodal approach to the study of play, and lead toward a greater understanding of the neuroscientific basis of play. It may also yield insights into a new biologically grounded taxonomy of play interactions.

Speaker gaze increases information coupling between infant and adult brains

When infants and adults communicate, they exchange social signals of availability and communicative intention such as eye gaze. Previous research indicates that when communication is successful, close temporal dependencies arise between adult speakers' and listeners' neural activity. However, it is not known whether similar neural contingencies exist within adult-infant dyads. Here, we used dual-electroencephalography to assess whether direct gaze increases neural coupling between adults and infants during screen-based and live interactions. In experiment 1 (n = 17), infants viewed videos of an adult who was singing nursery rhymes with (i) direct gaze (looking forward), (ii) indirect gaze (head and eyes averted by 20°), or (iii) direct-oblique gaze (head averted but eyes orientated forward). In experiment 2 (n = 19), infants viewed the same adult in a live context, singing with direct or indirect gaze. Gaze-related changes in adult-infant neural network connectivity were measured using partial directed coherence. Across both experiments, the adult had a significant (Granger) causal influence on infants' neural activity, which was stronger during direct and direct-oblique gaze relative to indirect gaze. During live interactions, infants also influenced the adult more during direct than indirect gaze. Further, infants vocalized more frequently during live direct gaze, and individual infants who vocalized longer also elicited stronger synchronization from the adult. These results demonstrate that direct gaze strengthens bidirectional adult-infant neural connectivity during communication. Thus, ostensive social signals could act to bring brains into mutual temporal alignment, creating a joint-networked state that is structured to facilitate information transfer during early communication and learning.

Infant Attention Is Dynamically Modulated With Changing Arousal Levels

Traditional accounts of developing attention and cognition emphasize static individual differences in information encoding; however, work from Aston-Jones et al. suggests that looking behavior may be dynamically influenced by autonomic arousal. To test this model, a 20-min testing battery constituting mixed photos and cartoon clips was shown to 53 typical 12-month-olds. Look duration was recorded to index attention, and continuous changes in arousal were tracked by measuring heart rate, electrodermal activity, and movement levels. Across three analyses, we found that continuous changes in arousal tracked simultaneous changes in attention measures, as predicted by the Aston-Jones model. It was also found that changes in arousal tended to precede (occur before) subsequent changes in attention. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Stress reactivity speeds basic encoding processes in infants

Acute stress attenuates frontal lobe functioning and increases distractibility while enhancing subcortical processes in both human and nonhuman animals (reviewed by Arnsten [2009] Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6):410-422). To date however these relations have not been examined for their potential effects in developing populations. Here, we examined the relationship between stress reactivity (infants' heart rate response to watching videos of another child crying) and infant performance on measures of looking duration and visual recognition memory. Our findings indicate that infants with increased stress reactivity showed shorter look durations and more novelty preference. Thus, stress appears to lead to a faster, more stimulus-ready attentional profile in infants. Additional work is required to assess potential negative consequences of stimulus-responsivity, such as decreased focus or distractibility. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 58: 546-555, 2016.

Tonic and phasic co-variation of peripheral arousal indices in infants

Tonic and phasic differences in peripheral autonomic nervous system (ANS) indicators strongly predict differences in attention and emotion regulation in developmental populations. However, virtually all previous research has been based on individual ANS measures, which poses a variety of conceptual and methodlogical challenges to comparing results across studies. Here we recorded heart rate, electrodermal activity (EDA), pupil size, head movement velocity and peripheral accelerometry concurrently while a cohort of 37 typical 12-month-old infants completed a mixed assessment battery lasting approximately 20 min per participant. We analysed covariation of these autonomic indices in three ways: first, tonic (baseline) arousal; second, co-variation in spontaneous (phasic) changes during testing; third, phasic co-variation relative to an external stimulus event. We found that heart rate, head velocity and peripheral accelerometry showed strong positive co-variation across all three analyses. EDA showed no co-variation in tonic activity levels but did show phasic positive co-variation with other measures, that appeared limited to sections of high but not low general arousal. Tonic pupil size showed significant positive covariation, but phasic pupil changes were inconsistent. We conclude that: (i) there is high covariation between autonomic indices in infants, but that EDA may only be sensitive at extreme arousal levels, (ii) that tonic pupil size covaries with other indices, but does not show predicted patterns of phasic change and (iii) that motor activity appears to be a good proxy measure of ANS activity. The strongest patterns of covariation were observed using epoch durations of 40s per epoch, although significant covariation between indices was also observed using shorter epochs (1 and 5s).

Reflexive anaphor resolution in spoken language comprehension: structural constraints and beyond

We report results from an eye-tracking during listening study examining English-speaking adults’ online processing of reflexive pronouns, and specifically whether the search for an antecedent is restricted to syntactically appropriate positions. Participants listened to a short story where the recipient of an object was introduced with a reflexive, and were asked to identify the object recipient as quickly as possible. This allowed for the recording of participants’ offline interpretation of the reflexive, response times, and eye movements on hearing the reflexive. Whilst our offline results show that the ultimate interpretation for reflexives was constrained by binding principles, the response time, and eye-movement data revealed that during processing participants were temporarily distracted by a structurally inappropriate competitor antecedent when this was prominent in the discourse. These results indicate that in addition to binding principles, online referential decisions are also affected by discourse-level information.