Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) dynamics matter for children's emotion regulation: RSA inertia and instability within a stress task

Abstract

The present study employed two key dynamic indicators (i.e., inertia and instability) to the psychophysiological research of child emotion regulation (ER) and examined whether respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) dynamics were associated with child ER during a stress task. Eighty‐nine Chinese school‐age children (Mage = 8.77 years, SD = 1.80 years; 46.1% girls) and their primary caregivers participated in the study. After controlling for RSA static reactivity, multiple regression analyses indicated that lower RSA inertia was related to fewer in‐task negative emotions rated by children and their caregivers, and higher RSA instability was associated with better child trait ER. This study introduces physiological indicators of the dynamic aspects of parasympathetic activity to the study of child ER.

Grandmother–grandchild physiological synchrony in Chinese three‐generation families: Links with child emotion regulation

“…Empirical studies have also found that grandmothers are more likely to suppress emotions than are mothers (Qiu & Shum, 2022). Thus, children may practice inhibition as they learn from their grandmothers as adaptive emotion regulation strategies (Chiang, 2012; Xu et al., 2023).…”

RSA instability in mothers of preschoolers and adolescents is related to observations of supportive parenting behaviors

“…Guided by the Coping Complexity Model (Hudson, 2016), the present study examined relations between depressive symptoms and supportive parenting with RSA instability in mothers with children in the preschool and adolescent developmental periods. Regarding RSA instability, to our knowledge, there is only one published study quantifying instability in children (Xu et al, 2023) and only one that assessed RSA regulation in parents (Struge-Apple et al, 2020), despite strong theoretical justification for doing so. Informed by the emotion instability literature (Houben et al, 2015;Sperry & Kwapil, 2022;Sperry et al, 2020) and prior RSA research (Atzil & Barrett, 2017;Somers et al, 2021Somers et al, , 2022West et al, 2021;Xu et al, 2023), the following hypotheses were put forth: regardless of child age, (1) maternal depressive symptoms would be positively associated with RSA instability; (2) supportive parenting would negatively relate to RSA instability.…”

“…In light of the Coping Complexity Model (Hudson, 2016) or exceed the time needed to quantify psychophysiological change (Xu et al, 2023). Thus, quantifying dynamic RSA responses likely still requires evaluation using 30-s windows of data collection to measure physiological reactivity reliably (Berntson et al, 1997;Fisher & Woodward, 2014).…”

“…Instability is another methodology used to capture dynamic physiological coping. Different from physiological volatility, which measures the extent to which a person's physiology fluctuates around their equilibrium (Somers et al, 2022), RSA instability captures the magnitude of change in RSA across a task through successive epoch difference scores (Xu et al, 2023). Only one study to date has calculated RSA instability and related this dynamic measure of coping to negative emotionality during a stressful task in a sample of school-aged children.…”