Neuroendocrine and behavioral response to social rupture and repair in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders interacting with mother and father

Abstract

Background: Preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit difficulties in handling social stress and utilizing efficient emotion regulation (ER) strategies to manage high arousal. While researchers called to assess ER in ASD, few studies utilized direct observations. We tested children's behavioral and cortisol response to maternal and paternal unavailability and hypothesized that children with ASD will employ less complex ER strategies and their parents would show increased regulation facilitation effort to accommodate their child's difficulties. Methods: Forty preschoolers with ASD were matched with 40 typically developing (TD) preschoolers. Children were seen twice for identical battery with mother or father in the face-to-face-still-face paradigm, a three-episode paradigm where parent-child play (free play (FP)) is interrupted by elimination of communication (still face (SF)) followed by resuming play (reunion (RE)). Micro-coding of parent and child's social behavior and ER strategies was conducted. Parent and child's cortisol was assessed at baseline, following stress, and at recovery. Results: Children with ASD exhibited the typical SF effect, indexed by an increase in negative affect and decrease in positive communications, but employed more simple regulatory behavior (self-soothing, proximity-seeking) and less complex strategies involving attention redirection and substitutive play. Their parents used more regulationfacilitation behavior, both simple and complex. All children showed initial cortisol response to novelty, which declined over time. However, maternal presence suppressed initial cortisol response in children with ASD.

Network integrity of the parental brain in infancy supports the development of children’s social competencies

“…These networks enable humans to share intentions and experiences during online social interactions (Frith and Frith, 2012) and their functioning has been shown to motivate empathic-related prosocial behavior in everyday life (Rameson et al , 2011). Preschoolers of parents with greater embodied-simulation connectivity displayed lower negative emotionality, which has been linked with greater social competence (Eisenberg et al , 2000), and greater use of complex regulatory strategies, abilities that characterize children with advanced social skills and lower psychopathology (Hirschler-Guttenberg et al , 2015; Ostfeld-Etzion et al 2015). Finally, preschoolers of parents who displayed higher connectivity of the mentalizing network exhibited higher self-regulated socialization.…”

“…The Masks and Bubbles paradigms, tapping child emotion regulation, were each micro-coded for the child’s expression of positive emotionality (positive affect, positive vocalizations and laughter) and negative emotionality (negative affect, withdrawal, crying/yelling and protest). Two types of regulatory behaviors were micro-coded, consistent with prior research (Feldman et al, 2011; Hirschler-Guttenberg et al , 2015; Ostfeld-Etzion et al , 2015): Simple regulatory behaviors—included behaviors aiming solely at self-regulation that clearly display the child’s regulatory effort, such as physical self-soothing (e.g. thumb-sucking), verbal self-soothing (e.g.…”

Towards a second-person neuropsychiatry

“…Therefore, the use of more complex and ecologically valid paradigms is likely to help tap into those processes that underlie social dysfunction in everyday-life social interactions. With regard to emotional regulation, for instance, it can be argued that emotion regulation in ontogeny is primarily an interpersonally constituted process, which may rely on parental abilities of social buffering [57]. Only later in life do children fully develop the capacity to independently regulate their own emotions.…”

Family Roles in Developing Resilience Skills in School Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…The result further indicated that each parenting style made a unique impact on social engagement in infants at high-and low-risk for ASDs. Ostfeld-Etzion, Golan, Hirschler-Guttenberg, Zagoory-Sharon, and Feldman, (2015) found that maternal presence and regulation facilitation provided social buffering for the children with ASDs' hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress response like mammalian neonates. This implied that poor social behaviour in high-risk infants as opposed to complex social behaviours of gestures and language may be masked through maternal behaviour.…”