The effects of maternal respiratory sinus arrhythmia and behavioral engagement on mother‐child physiological coregulation

Abstract

THE EFFECTS OF MATERNAL RESPIRATORY SINUS ARRHYTHMIA AND BEHAVIORAL ENGAGEMENT ON MOTHER-CHILD PHYSIOLOGICAL COREGULATIONParent-child coregulation, observed as the active organization and coordination of parents' and children's behavioral and physiological states, is an important precursor for children's developing self-regulation, but we know little about how individual parent factors shape parent-child coregulation. We examined whether differences in maternal physiology and behavioral engagement were associated with coregulation of mothers' and their 3-year-old children's physiological states over time. We examined coregulation in real time by modeling maternal and child respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) for 47 families across 18 minutes of dyadic interaction using multilevel coupled autoregressive models fitted in Mplus. Maternal basal RSA, maternal teaching, and maternal behavioral disengagement were each entered as between-subjects predictors to determine the extent to which mother-child coregulation was strengthened or weakened by maternal factors. Whereas greater maternal teaching during the mother-child interaction was associated with stronger coregulation in mother and child RSA over time, maternal disengagement was related to weaker coregulation: specifically, there were moredivergent parent and child RSA at higher levels of maternal disengagement. Coregulation in mother-child RSA was also weakened when mothers' basal RSA was higher. Findings contribute to the emerging knowledge base on real-time patterns of parent-child coregulation and iii suggest a role for parent-child physiological coregulation as a mechanism by which parent factors support or hinder children's developing self-regulation.

Proximity and Touch are associated with Neural but not Physiological Synchrony in Naturalistic Mother-Infant Interactions

“…Positive RSA synchrony between 4-to 6-month-old infants and their mothers was associated with co-regulation during a still-face paradigm (Abney, da Silva, & Bertenthal, under reviewb). Furthermore, three-year-old children and their mothers showed stronger RSA synchrony during higher levels of maternal teaching and weaker synchrony when mothers were disengaged (Skoranski, Lunkenheimer, & Lucas-Thompson, 2017). On the other hand, negative RSA synchrony in a video watching situation was related to higher child-reported empathy at ages 9-14 years, while positive RSA synchrony was associated with lower levels of empathy among the dyads (Creavy, Gatzke-Kopp, Zhang, Fishbein, & Kiser, 2020).…”

Mother–Child Coregulation of Parasympathetic Processes Differs by Child Maltreatment Severity and Subtype

“…Further, we did not control for individual differences in breathing rate nor for physical touch between parent and child, which could influence RSA. If PNS functioning underlies parents’ abilities to engage with children, it will be important to pursue more specific and comprehensive measurement of parental PNS and SNS functioning in studying how it is involved in physiological coregulation (Skoranski, Lunkenheimer, & Lucas-Thompson, 2018).…”

A systematic review of caregiver–child physiological synchrony across systems: Associations with behavior and child functioning

“…However, Helm et al (2018) found that parasympathetic synchrony disappears in dyads with 3–4-year-olds after de-trending, suggesting different analytic techniques lead to different conclusions. Regardless, several studies that use strong multilevel modeling strategies demonstrate that parasympathetic synchrony in toddlerhood is associated with lower maternal and child psychopathological symptoms (Gray et al, 2018; Lunkenheimer et al, 2015 & 2018b, same sample), increased maternal teaching and engagement (Skoranski et al, 2017; same sample as Lunkenheimer et al, 2015; 2018b), and a lack of a history of maltreatment (Creaven et al, 2014). Shih et al (2019) found that parent parasympathetic activity during a frustrating puzzle task positively predicted child parasympathetic activity during recovery, but did not test for associations with behavior or child functioning.…”

“…Research on caregiver–child physiological synchrony has been growing rapidly in recent years, as it is suspected to help explain how caregivers and children interact with and respond to each other, thus affecting children's long-term development. Physiological synchrony has been measured and discussed using various terms (e.g., concordance, attunement, coregulation, coordination) with little consistency or clarity in the construct's exact definition (e.g., Saxbe et al, 2014; Skoranski, Lunkenheimer, & Lucas-Thompson, 2017; Suveg et al, 2019). Generally, the concept is used to refer to the association between some measure of physiological activity in the caregiver and that same measure in the child in response to a task or in a particular context.…”