Longitudinal effects of maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and Reminiscing and Emotion Training on children's diurnal cortisol regulation

Abstract

Dysregulation in children's physiological stress systems is a key process linking early adversity to poor health and psychopathology. Thus, interventions that improve children's stress physiology may help prevent deleterious health outcomes. Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) is a brief relational intervention designed to improve maternal caregiving support by enhancing maltreating mothers’ capacity to reminisce with their young children. This study evaluated associations between maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and the RET intervention with changes in children's diurnal cortisol regulation across the 1 year following the intervention, and the extent to which improvements in maternal elaborative reminiscing differed between intervention groups and mediated change in children's physiological functioning. Participants were 237 children (aged 36 to 86 months) and their mothers. Results indicated that the RET intervention was associated with significant positive change in elaborative reminiscing, which was sustained over time. Mothers’ elaboration immediately after the intervention served as a mediator of RET's effects on improvements in children's diurnal cortisol regulation (steeper diurnal slopes) from baseline to 1 year following intervention. This suggests RET is effective in facilitating physiological regulation among maltreated children.

Child diurnal cortisol differs based on profiles of maternal emotion socialization in high risk, low income, and racially diverse families

“…The current finding potentially highlights encouraging children's emotional expression, engaging in emotion focused and problem focused responses, positive expression, sensitive guidance of emotions, and not engaging in distress, punitive, or minimizing reactions as buffers to heightened physiological activity. This is aligned with recent findings that improvement in maternal sensitive guidance following the Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) intervention was associated with steepening of cortisol slopes from baseline to 1 year in this sample (Valentino et al., 2020). Future intervention research should continue to explore these aspects of emotion socialization as a way to ameliorate the negative physiological impacts of child maltreatment and adversity.…”

Salivary Cortisol Reaction Norms in Zoo-Housed Great Apes: Diurnal Slopes and Intercepts as Indicators of Stress Response Quality

“…In humans, cortisol slopes are commonly classified as inconsistent, typical, or flat, based on the steepness of cortisol decrease throughout the day [ 10 , 35 ]. For example, flatter cortisol slopes were found in humans with posttraumatic stress disorder [ 36 ], depression [ 37 ], fatigue [ 38 ], and a history of maltreatment [ 39 , 40 ]. Also in non-human animals, a blunted diurnal slope may be indicative of a long-term stressor: for example, the diurnal slope was blunted in barren housed pigs compared to enriched housed pigs [ 41 ].…”

Developmental and Intervention‐Related Change in Autobiographical Memory Specificity in Maltreated Children: Indirect Effects of Maternal Reminiscing

“…Furthermore, our results demonstrate that intervention‐related improvement in maternal sensitive guidance is related to better child AMS 1 year after the intervention, which adds to our understanding of the benefits associated with RET for child development. Additional intervention‐related benefits associated with RET include greater child memory contributions during reminiscing and emotion knowledge immediately after the intervention (Valentino et al., 2019), child emotion regulation 6 months after the intervention (Speidel, Wang, Cummings & Valentino, 2020), and enhanced physiological regulation 1 year after the intervention (Valentino, Hibel, Speidel, Fondren & Ugarte, 2020).…”