Background: Research to date has largely conceptualized irritability in terms of intraindividual differences. However, the role of interpersonal dyadic processes has received little consideration. Nevertheless, difficulties in how parentchild dyads synchronize during interactions may be an important correlate of irritably in early childhood. Innovations in developmentally sensitive neuroimaging methods now enable the use of measures of neural synchrony to quantify synchronous responses in parent-child dyads and can help clarify the neural underpinnings of these difficulties. We introduce the Disruptive Behavior Diagnostic Observation Schedule: Biological Synchrony (DB-DOS:BioSync) as a paradigm for exploring parent-child neural synchrony as a potential biological mechanism for interpersonal difficulties in preschool psychopathology. Methods: Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) 4-to 5year-olds (N = 116) and their mothers completed the DB-DOS:BioSync while assessing neural synchrony during mild frustration and recovery. Child irritability was measured using a latent irritability factor that was calculated from four developmentally sensitive indicators. Results: Both the mild frustration and the recovery contexts resulted in neural synchrony. However, less neural synchrony during the recovery context only was associated with more child irritability. Conclusions: Our results suggest that recovering after a frustrating period might be particularly challenging for children high in irritability and offer support for the use of the DB-DOS:BioSync task to elucidate interpersonal neural mechanisms of developmental psychopathology.

Children commonly experience negative emotions like sadness and fear, and much recent empirical attention has been devoted to understanding the factors supporting and predicting effective emotion regulation. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a cardiac index of parasympathetic function, has emerged as a key physiological correlate of children's self-regulation. But, little is known about how children's use of specific cognitive emotion regulation strategies corresponds to concurrent parasympathetic regulation (i.e., RSA reactivity while watching an emotion-eliciting video). The current study describes an experimental paradigm in which 101 5- to 6-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of three different emotion regulation conditions (Control, Distraction, Reappraisal). All children watched a sad and a scary film (order counterbalanced), and children in the Distraction and Reappraisal conditions received instructions to deploy the target strategy to manage sadness/fear while they watched. Consistent with predictions, children assigned to use either emotion regulation strategy showed greater RSA augmentation from baseline than children in the Control condition (all children showed an overall increase in RSA levels from baseline), suggesting enhanced parasympathetic calming when children used Distraction or Reappraisal to regulate sadness and fear. But, this pattern was found only among children who viewed the sad film before the scary film. Among children who viewed the scary film first, Reappraisal promoted marginally better parasympathetic regulation of fear (no condition differences emerged for parasympathetic regulation of sadness when the sad film was viewed second). Results are discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of children's emotion regulation and affective physiology.

Certain psychopathologies are often linked to dysregulation of specific emotions (e.g., anxiety is associated with dysregulation of fear), but few studies have examined how regulatory repertoires for specific emotions (e.g., the strategies a person uses to regulate fear) relate to psychopathology, and fewer still have examined this in childhood. A total of 106 7- to 11-year-olds (M = 9.37 years; SD = 1.30; 44% girls) participated in a multimethod investigation of emotion regulation and psychopathology. Parents reported on family characteristics and children's symptoms. Resting parasympathetic function (respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) was measured to assess physiological regulation. Children were interviewed about past experiences that made them feel anger, fear, and sadness, and reported what they had done to make themselves feel better in each emotion context. The strategies children described were summed to create an emotion regulation strategy repertoire measure for each emotion. Children's resting RSA interacted with age to predict externalizing symptoms, such that low resting RSA was associated with more externalizing symptoms for younger children only. In contrast, the link between RSA and anxiety was qualified by both strategy repertoire for fear and age, such that higher resting RSA was most strongly associated with fewer anxiety symptoms for older children with larger strategy repertoires for fear. Contrary to our expectations, neither resting RSA nor strategy repertoire for sadness related to children's depressive symptoms. Findings underscore the importance of considering children's discrete emotion regulation strategy repertoires to more fully characterize the dysregulated affective processes associated with psychopathology in childhood. (PsycINFO Database Record

Parent-child synchrony—parent-child interaction patterns characterized by contingent social responding, mutual responsivity, and co-regulation—has been robustly associated with adaptive child outcomes. Synchrony has been investigated in both behavioral and biological frameworks. While it has been demonstrated that adversity can influence behavioral parent-child synchrony, the neural mechanisms by which this disruption occurs are understudied. The current study examined the association between adversity, parent-child behavioral synchrony, and parent-child neural synchrony across lateral prefrontal cortical regions using functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning during a parent-child interaction task that included a mild stress induction followed by a recovery period. Participants included 115 children (ages 4-5) and their primary caregivers. Parent-child behavioral synchrony was quantified as the amount time the dyad was synchronous (e.g., reciprocal communication, coordinated behaviors) during the interaction task. Parent-child neural synchrony was examined as the hemodynamic concordance between parent and child lateral PFC activation. Adversity was examined across two, empirically-derived domains: sociodemographic risk (e.g., family income) and familial risk (e.g., household chaos). Adversity, across domains, was associated with decreased parent-child behavioral synchrony across task conditions. Sociodemographic risk was associated with decreased parent-child neural synchrony in the context of experimentally-induced stress. These findings link adversity to decreased parent-child behavioral and neural synchrony.

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Social deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been linked to atypical activation of the mentalizing network. This work, however, has been limited by a focus on the brain activity of a single person during computerized social tasks rather than exploring brain activity during in vivo interactions. The current study assessed neural synchronization during a conversation as a mechanism for social impairment in adults with ASD (n = 24) and matched controls (n = 26). Functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data were collected from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and tempoparietal junction (TPJ). Participants self‐reported on their social communication and videos of the interaction were coded for utterances and conversational turns. As expected, controls showed more neural synchrony than participants with ASD in the TPJ. Also as expected, controls showed less social communication impairment than participants with ASD. However, participants with ASD did not have fewer utterances compared with control subjects. Overall, less neural synchrony in the TPJ was associated with higher social impairment and marginally fewer utterances. Our findings advance our understanding of social difficulties in ASD by linking them to decreased neural synchronization of the TPJ. Lay Summary The coordination of brain responses is important for efficient social interactions. The current study explored the coordination of brain responses in neurotypical adults and adults with ASD to investigate if difficulties in social interactions are related to difficulties coordinating brain responses in ASD. We found that participants with ASD had more difficulties coordinating brain responses during a conversation with an interacting partner. Additionally, we found that the level of coordination in brain responses was linked to problems with social communication.

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Parenting practices play a major role in socializing children's developing regulatory abilities, but less is known about how parents' regulatory abilities relate to children's healthy functioning. This study examined whether parents' physiological and emotion regulation abilities corresponded to children's physiological and emotional responding to a structured laboratory-based disappointment task. Ninety-seven 3- to 7-year-olds (56 girls; M = 5.79 years) and one parent participated in a multi-method assessment of parents' and children's regulatory functioning. Direct (coaching children to use reappraisal) and indirect (resting physiology, dispositional use of reappraisal) aspects of parents' regulatory abilities were assessed. As expected, an adaptive pattern of parent regulatory abilities composed of higher resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia, use of reappraisal, and coaching reappraisal was associated with children's physiological reactivity after a disappointment indicative of more effective physiological calming in a recovery context (increased parasympathetic activation). In contrast, parents' regulatory abilities did not relate to changes in children's expressions of emotional distress.