Linking preschoolers’ parasympathetic activity to maternal early adversity and child behavior: An intergenerational perspective

Abstract

Increasing evidence suggests intergenerational effects of maternal early adversity on offspring self‐regulation. Prior work has demonstrated associations between maternal adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and infant respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a parasympathetic biomarker associated with emotional and behavioral self‐regulation. The present study examined these associations and additional potential pathways including children's violence exposure and maternal psychopathology among 123 biological mother‐child dyads. Families were low‐income and oversampled for violence exposure; children were 3–5 years old. RSA was examined during dyadic interaction using latent growth curve modeling (LGCM). On average, females exhibited greater RSA reactivity. Greater RSA withdrawal across the interaction was associated with greater child negative affect during the interaction, linking RSA reactivity to concurrent child behavior. Consistent with previous findings among infants, high maternal ACEs were associated with lower child RSA at task initiation but not with RSA reactivity across the interaction. Findings suggest that the association between high maternal ACEs and a lower set point for offspring RSA persists into the early childhood period, beyond the influence of maternal psychopathology and children's own violence exposure. These data provide further evidence for the biological embedding of maternal early adversity across generations as well as for the relevance of RSA to child behavioral regulation.

Parental history of childhood maltreatment and child average RSA shape parent–child RSA synchrony

“…Recent work has started to extend this research to children of parents with CM history, suggesting there may be intergenerational transmission of altered physiological stress regulation (Alink et al, 2019;Thomas et al, 2018). In line with this, studies show that parental history of CM is associated with RSA dysregulation in the next generation, specifically, children of parents with more severe CM seem to generally show lower average RSA (Glackin et al, 2020;Gray et al, 2017). Thus, RSA synchrony may be a pathway linking parent and child physiological and emotional dysregulation in context of parental history of CM.…”

Prefrontal activation in preschool children is associated with maternal adversity and child temperament: A preliminary fNIRS study of inhibitory control

“…Finally, we used retrospective report of adversity. Although this is one of the most frequently used methods for measuring life adversity (Glackin et al., 2021; Miller, Dennis, et al., 2022; van de Ven et al., 2020), retrospective and prospective reports have been shown to have low agreement and may be associated with health outcomes via different pathways (Baldwin et al., 2019).…”

“…Taken together, mothers' cumulative adversity exposure and adversity exposure during different life stages, such as childhood and pregnancy, could have long-lasting consequences for the biobehavioral development of their offspring. In support of this perspective, researchers have reported that maternal history of adversity exposure is associated with individual differences in children's parasympathetic nervous system functioning (Glackin et al, 2021), behavioral problems (van de Ven et al, 2020), temperament (Bouvette-Turcot et al, 2020), and morphology (Moog et al, 2018) and functional connectivity (Hendrix et al, 2021) in the brain. It is not yet clear, however, whether young children's PFC functioning (i.e., activation) is altered following maternal or child adversity.…”

Introduction to the SEED Science special issue

“…Expanding the line of inquiry discussed previously by Stephens, Glackin et al. (2022) provide data examining parental early adversity (ACE score) and RSA in their preschoolers. They documented greater reactivity among female preschoolers, that greater RSA withdrawal was associated with more child negative affect, and that parental adversity history was associated with lower child RSA at task initiation (but not RSA reactivity).…”