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

Abstract

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.

Research Review: Do parent ratings of infant negative emotionality and self‐regulation predict psychopathology in childhood and adolescence? A systematic review and meta‐analysis of prospective longitudinal studies

“…This lack of specificity may relate to the fact that, for both negative emotionality and self-regulation, arousal systems are thought to play an important role in both affective and cognitive function (Geva & Feldman, 2008;Wass et al). Early atypical development within arousal/regulatory systems may, therefore, lead to increased risk of multiple psychopathologies later in development (Conway, Raposa, Hammen, & Brennan, 2018).…”

The Strengths of People in Poverty

“…Hidden-talents research shows that people might develop a suite of related abilities to deal with harsh and unpredictable environments, in which threat looms large and potential rewards are sparse and short-lived. For instance, people might become adept at detecting imminent dangers and opportunities (for reviews, see Ellis et al, 2017, and Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013), shifting efficiently among different tasks or mental sets (Mittal, Griskevicius, Simpson, Sung, & Young, 2015), tracking rapidly changing conditions (Young, Griskevicius, Simpson, Waters, & Mittal, 2018), persisting when procuring an immediate reward (Suor, Sturge-Apple, Davies, & Cicchetti, 2017), and reacting faster to, and recovering faster from, negative affect displayed by other people in their environments (Wass et al, 2019).…”

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

“…Based on previous findings with infants (de Barbaro et al, 2016b;Wass et al, 2019) and similar results with adults (Arnsten, 2009) and based on previous results into the physiological effects of urban environments on older children (Evans et al, 2001), we predicted that infants raised in higher density (HD) urban environments would show elevated physiological stress, and that these changes would be accompanied by reduced sustained attention and increased emotion reactivity to a stressor. We also predicted that HD infants would show cognitive strengths: specifically, superior visual recognition memory and increased neural indices of cognitive engagement towards novel stimuli.…”

“…Understanding this can elucidate whether the relationships previously documented in older children are mediated by more long-term cognitive factors such as learnt helplessness (Wells, 2000), in which case they ought not to be observed in infants. An alternative hypothesis is that they arise as a direct result of stressors such as high environmental noise, which has been shown to associate with elevated physiological stress in infants (Wass et al, 2019). Understanding these developmental pathways is also important because individuals are considered most phenotypically sensitive to environmental influences during early life (Bryck & Fisher, 2012) -and so it is possible that the effects of urban living on development are stronger during infancy than at other times.…”