RSA reactivity in response to viewing bullying film and adolescent social adjustment

Abstract

This study assessed adolescent respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity while watching a bullying film clip from Boyz'n the Hood. We emphasized the importance of considering measurement context of RSA and examined whether RSA reactivity moderated the links between environmental factors (i.e., neighborhood violence, parental psychological control, and parental acceptance) and adolescent social adjustment. Data were collected from 57 adolescents and their primary caregivers.Electrocardiogram (ECG) and respiration data were obtained from adolescents.Results indicated that neighborhood violence was positively associated with aggressive behavior but only among adolescents showing RSA augmentation, not suppression. Among youth displaying RSA suppression, parental acceptance was positively linked to prosocial behavior. We propose that, in the specific context of watching a bullying film clip, RSA suppression may relate to physiological regulation of emotion, which may differentially influence adolescents' responses to socialization. K E Y W O R D Sadolescence, aggressive behavior, neighborhood violence, parenting, prosocial behavior, RSA reactivity [Correction added on February 15, 2019, after first online publication: The last two co-authors' affiliations were changed from

Maternal Intimate Partner Violence Exposure and Autonomic Reactivity: Associations With Positive Parenting

“…Third, the results showed that an increase in maternal RSA from baseline to task was positively associated with positive parenting. Previous research has shown that positive parenting is associated with both RSA activation and withdrawal (Leerkes et al, 2017;Lorber & O'Leary, 2005;Moore et al, 2009;Shaffer et al, 2018), but some researchers have argued that different types of tasks and contexts place different demands on physiological systems, and therefore adaptive RSA responses may look different in different contexts (Connell et al, 2017;Cui et al, 2019). For example, RSA withdrawal has been associated with adaptive functioning during stressful tasks (Balzarotti et al, 2017;Connell et al, 2017), but RSA activation has been associated with adaptive functioning and efforts to engage in self-regulation in positive social interactions and to recover from stress (Balzarotti et al, 2017;Butler et al, 2006).…”

High-Frequency Heart Rate Variability and Emotion-Driven Impulse Control Difficulties During Adolescence: Examining Experienced and Expressed Negative Emotion as Moderators

“…Fast Fourier transformation was used to extract values in the 0.23 to 0.5 frequency band (an age-appropriate respiratory frequency band for this adolescent sample; Cui, Zhang, Houltberg, Criss, & Morris, 2019; Shader et al, 2018). Both the resting task and the conflict task were split into 1-minute epochs; thus, HF-HRV values were obtained for every 1-minute epoch.…”

Vagal flexibility to negative emotions moderates the relations between environmental risk and adjustment problems in childhood

“…For example, less RSA reactivity (less withdrawal) to emotional video stimuli has been found to act as a differential susceptibility factor, associated with more problems in contexts of greater maternal rejection (Wagner et al, 2018b) marital conflict (Obradovic et al, 2011), and community violence (Cui et al, 2019), and with fewer problems in less aversive contexts, whereas these environmental factors were not associated with problems for greater RSA withdrawal. Conversely, El-Sheikh et al (2001), El-Sheikh andWhitson 2006) and Katz and Gottman (1997) found that less RSA reactivity acted as a diathesis, being associated with more problems for children who experienced more marital conflict, but not fewer problems than average in the absence of conflict; marital conflict did not predict problems when RSA withdrawal was greater.…”