An event‐based analysis of maternal physiological reactivity following aversive child behaviors

Abstract

Research investigating the association between parents' physiological reactivity and their ability to self‐regulate in parenting contexts typically examines the average physiological response across the duration of a dyadic task, conflating reactivity across a multitude of parent and child behaviors. The present study utilized a moving‐window analytical technique to generate a continuous, second × second time series of mothers' high‐frequency heart rate variability (HF‐HRV) to conduct an event‐based analysis of maternal reactivity in the 10 s following an aversive child event. Analyses examined whether maternal reactivity related to parenting behaviors similarly among maltreating (n = 48) and non‐maltreating (n = 29) mother‐preschooler dyads. Results indicate that maternal behavior was not associated with average HF‐HRV reactivity, but mothers who demonstrated an increase in HF‐HRV immediately following a negative child event were more likely to engage in behaviors to return the dyad to a positive state. Findings were specific to incidents of negative child behavior, and results were not moderated by maltreatment status. These results highlight the value of using an event‐based design to isolate reactivity in response to targeted events to understand how physiological reactivity supports parenting.

Integrating Biobehavioral and Environmental Components of Developmental Psychopathology via Interpersonal Dynamics: An RDoC-Advancing Model

“…Power estimates were obtained within the adult respiration frequency band (0.12–0.40 Hz; Berntson, Quigley, & Lozano, 2007 ) for caregiver participants and within age-appropriate frequency bands for child participants (Shader et al, 2018 ). In short, the combination of PM MW and STFT produces point estimates of time-varying RSA for the central second in every rolling 32-s window, while drawing on information from the 16 s before and after the central second (Gates et al, 2015 ); notably, this focal tapering method has been shown to capture changes in RSA without requiring first-differencing (Gatzke-Kopp et al, 2022 ). The PM MW/STFT method has been validated among adult and caregiver-child dyads (Gatzke-Kopp et al, 2022 ; Somers et al, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2022 ).…”