2-140 - Co-creating interactions with parents: Child effects reexamined.

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Broadly speaking, our symposium is concerned with “child effects”, or the manner in which children shape their ecological niche starting in infancy, focusing on dynamics in exchanges with their caregivers. Two of the presentations include cardiac indicators, examining child physiological reactivity and its effects on parent-child interactions, for fathers as well as mothers in one instance. The other two address parent-child interactions in the first year of life, considering infants’ temperament contributions to shaping the nature of dyadic exchanges and their transformation across infancy, as well as links between parent-child interactions and attachment security.

Overall, results of these diverse sets of studies provide compelling evidence of consistent, albeit nuanced effects of children, who emerged as active co-creators of their interactional milieu. Physiological responses of 7-10 year old children became significantly positively coordinated with mothers’, but not fathers’ physiological responses during the conflict conversation, only when mothers suppressed their emotions. For preschool-age children, physiologic markers of emotional dysregulation appeared to shape maternal parenting, with emotional labiality potentially evoking less child-focused/more maladaptive parenting. As maternal parenting did not influence children’s parasympathetic emotional dysregulation, child effects may be more critical in this context. Infancy studies demonstrated considerable changes in reciprocity and directedness of parent-child interactions over the first year of life, with infant negative affectivity and regulatory capacity/orienting shaping these trajectories. Child negative emotionality also moderated the impact mother-infant interactions on attachment security, insofar as maternal sensitivity to infant distress was significantly negatively associated with resistance/disorganization only among children high in negative emotionality.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chairs

• Maria Gartstein, Washington State University

• Sydney Iverson, Washington State University

Individual Presentations

• Does emotion suppression influence parent-child physiological coordination? An examination of mother- and father-child dyads - Presenting Author: Sara Waters, Washington State University; Tessa West, New York University; Helena Rose Karnilowicz, UC Berkeley; Wendy Berry Mendes, University of California, San Francisco

• The Cascading Effect of Preschooler Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia in Shaping Maternal Parenting Behaviors - Presenting Author: Cara Kiff, UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior; Liliana J Lengua, university of Washington; Maureen Zalewski, University of Oregon; Stephanie Thompson, University of Washington

• Mother-child interactions across the first year of life: Contributions of infant temperament - Presenting Author: Maria Gartstein, Washington State University; Sydney Iverson, Washington State University; Eric E. Desmarais, Washington State University; Gregory Hancock, University of Maryland

• The Role of Maternal Sensitivity to Infant Distress and Infant Temperament in Relation to Infant Attachment Insecurity Dimensions - Presenting Author: Esther Leerkes, University of North Carolina at Greesnsboro; Nan Zhou, Beijing Normal University