Parenting stressors and young adolescents' depressive symptoms: Does high vagal suppression offer protection?

Abstract

Grounded in a dual-risk, biosocial perspective of developmental psychopathology, this study examined the role of higher vagal suppression in providing young adolescents protection from four parenting stressors. It was expected that lower vagal suppression would increase youth vulnerability to the deleterious effects of these parenting stressors. Depressive symptoms were examined as a central marker of socioemotional difficulties during early adolescence. The four parenting stressors examined were interparental hostility, maternal use of harsh discipline, maternal inconsistent discipline, and maternal psychological control. Participants were 68 young adolescents (Grade 6) and their mothers. Greater vagal suppression provided protection (i.e., lower depressive symptoms) from interparental hostility, harsh discipline, and maternal psychological control for boys but not for girls.

The “Heart” of depression during early adolescence

“…Finally, it is also worth noting that although our findings concerning RSAR replicate similar findings in the literature (see Hamilton & Alloy, ), others have found that RSAR indexes internalizing symptoms uniquely in boys, but not girls (Fletcher et al, ; Nederhof et al, ). One possible reason for these different findings concerns the nature of the tasks used across studies.…”

“…One possible reason for these different findings concerns the nature of the tasks used across studies. Both Fletcher et al () and Nederhof et al (), utilized a social stress task, designed to elicit performance‐related social stress. This is distinct from the current study, which elicited a stress response related to interpersonal problem‐solving with a parent.…”

“…Additionally, considering the difference between boys and girls in the rates and underlying mechanisms of depression, a few studies have investigated gender differences in the associations linking RSAR with depression and internalizing symptoms. For instance, in studies investigating vagal reactivity to a social challenge (i.e., speech task) with community samples of adolescents, vagal withdrawal conferred protection against self‐reported internalizing symptoms in the context of negative family functioning and parenting (e.g., interparental hostility, harsh discipline) for middle school‐aged boys, but not girls (Fletcher, Buehler, Buchanan, & Weymouth, ). In contrast, blunted vagal withdrawal, coupled with high sympathetic reactivity (i.e., hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis), yielded the greatest increase in self‐reported internalizing symptoms among 16–19 year old adolescent boys (Nederhof, Marceau, Shirtcliff, Hastings, & Oldehinkel, ).…”

“…Consistent with theory (Porges, ) and empirical evidence with clinical samples of youth and adults (e.g., Beauchaine, ; Koenig et al, ), we hypothesized that high baseline RSA and vagal withdrawal would be associated with lower levels of depressive and internalizing symptoms and better emotion regulation (e.g., higher levels of emotion regulation, lower levels of emotion lability/negativity), whereas low baseline RSA and blunted vagal withdrawal would be associated with more depressive and internalizing symptoms and deficits in emotion regulation. Adolescent gender was examined as a moderator of the aforementioned associations given evidence of heightened rates of internalizing symptoms and emotion dysregulation among girls as compared with boys (Hankin, ; NIMH, ), as well as some emerging evidence of potential gender differences in the associations linking baseline RSA or RSAR with internalizing symptoms among adolescents (e.g., Fletcher et al, ; Nederhof et al, ). Given the inconsistent pattern of associations between youth parasympathetic functioning and internalizing symptoms by gender, no a priori hypotheses were made.…”

Special aspects of 12-14 yrs children’s psychological protection

“…Theoretical ideas of modern researchers base on ideas of Z. Freud and A. Freud [14,15]. The representatives of this direction regarded psychological protection as the mean of solution the conflict between conscious and unconscious [12,13,16,18]. By opinion of some scientists [6, 7, 10 19], the most constructive psychological protection kinds are compensation and rationalization.…”