The regulation of emotions is one of the most important developmental objectives in a child's first few years of life, as it lays the foundation for long-term physical, cognitive, and psychological health. During the past decade there has been an increase in research concerning the physiological and behavioral underpinnings of emotion regulation and its development in children. This work suggests that early disruptions in the biological bases of emotion regulation appear related to later mood and behavior problems. Although it is clear that multiple biological systems -- sympathetic nervous system (SNS), parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), and hypothalamic pituitary axis (HPA) -- operate together to shape how well children regulate their emotions, most researchers in this area have tended to study one biological system at a time. Although these systems may be interrelated, little is known regarding how different aspects of infants' biobehavioral emotion regulatory system interact. This gap is a distinct omission given evidence from the child and adult literatures that early problems coordinating an emotional response anticipate behavioral expressions of psychopathology. Given the importance of the caregiver-child relationship context for young children's developing emotion regulation, this research examines the associations and dissociations among infants' SNS, PNS and HPA as they negotiate age-appropriate interactional contexts with their mothers. The situations, which include a compliance task and the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP), were selected because they each tap a different aspect of the mother-infant relationship salient to the 18-month old infant. The compliance task relies on dyadic cooperation, mutuality, and a sense of shared goals, whereas the SSP provides a lens on how an infant utilizes their primary caregiver for emotion regulation during a stressful situation. Toward these goals, a cohort of high-risk mother-infant dyads (N=100 dyads) who have been assessed prenatally (T1) and when infants were 5 months old (T2), will be assessed again, when infants are 18 months old (T3).
From a theoretical perspective, understanding how the coordination of different stress-response systems relates to regulated behavior may provide insight into how disruptions of physiological processes contribute to the lack of emotion regulation and problematic behavior in childhood. Knowledge regarding physiological processes and physiological correlates of behavior problems will permit better identification of children at risk for behavioral problems, which will facilitate the early intervention necessary to reduce the likelihood that children with behavioral problems will develop psychiatric disorders as adolescents and adults. In addition to supporting the continuation of an important investigation, this research incorporates state-of-the-art assessments of emotion, cognition, and physiology, and combines them in unique ways (i.e., integration of physiology and behavior) to provide unique training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, who will learn skills for conducting infancy research and receive training in research techniques for investigating social development and the acquisition and analysis of psychophysiology.
