Discrete emotion regulation strategy repertoires and parasympathetic physiology characterize psychopathology symptoms in childhood.

Abstract

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

The psychobiology of emotional development: The case for examining sociocultural processes

“…Building on this and other ANS investigations that have revealed the connections between faulty emotion regulation and psychopathology, recent work has linked resting RSA and the repertoire of adaptive discrete emotion regulation strategies children know to distinct types of psychopathological symptoms in late childhood (Quiñones‐Camacho & Davis, ). In this study, resting RSA was examined in relation to symptoms of externalizing, anxiety, and depression.…”

Parasympathetic regulation in cognitive and emotional challenge contexts differentially predicts specific aspects of children’s emotional functioning

“…Responses to the emotion regulation interview were transcribed, and strategies were coded using a coding scheme used in previous work (e.g., Quiñones‐Camacho & Davis, ). The coding scheme included multiple strategies used to create our repertoire measure to better capture children’s knowledge of strategies (Table ).…”

“…Moreover, although RSA suppression may be the most adaptive physiological response in some contexts (e.g., a cognitively demanding engaging task; Quas, Bauer, & Boyce, 2004), this is not necessarily true for contexts in which someone is attempting to enact or maintain a calming response (e.g., when faced with a sad film; Davis, Quiñones-Camacho, & Buss, 2016). What constitutes the "most adaptive" pattern of RSA reactivity will thus be constrained by the specific task context.…”

“…RSA was calculated offline using the Mindware Heart Rate Variability (HRV 3.0.2) software program. The high-frequency bandpass range for children in this sample (middle childhood) was derived from estimates of the average respiration rates of children in this age range (i.e., typically between 16 and 25 breaths per minutes) and set at 0.15-0.80 Hz (e.g., Johnson et al, 2017;Quiñones-Camacho & Davis, 2018). This somewhat conservative range was chosen to fall between the recommended range used for early childhood (0.24-1.04 Hz; Bar-Haim, Marshall, & Fox, 2000) and adults (0.12-0.40 Hz; Porges, 1986).…”

“…This somewhat conservative range was chosen to fall between the recommended range used for early childhood (0.24-1.04 Hz; Bar-Haim, Marshall, & Fox, 2000) and adults (0.12-0.40 Hz; Porges, 1986). Adjusting these parameters to fall between the early childhood and adult ranges has been used in previous studies with wide age ranges like this one (Porges et al, 2013;Quiñones-Camacho & Davis, 2018). RSA was reliably scored in 30-s epochs, and RSA for baseline and tasks was calculated by averaging all epochs available for that task.…”