Poster #217 - Social Buffering in Post-Institutionalized and Typically Developing Youth: The Role of Maternal Emotional Support

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Support from parents during distress can dampen the reactivity of children’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) stress system in a phenomenon called social buffering (Hostinar, Sullivan, & Gunnar, 2014). However, we understand little about which parenting characteristics are most predictive of effective buffering for typically-developing children and groups that on average do not show a buffered pattern of stress reactivity with parent support, such as children with prior institutional experience and adolescents (Authors, 2015a, b). The current study aimed to test the hypothesis that variation in maternal emotional support –defined as having a parent who coaches as opposed to dismisses their emotions- explains within-group differences in the effectiveness of social buffering for both post-institutionalized (PI) youth and typically developing children and adolescents.

The sample included 162 participants, including children (M = 9.83 years, SD = .55) and adolescents (M = 15.81 years, SD = .60); 81 participants were internationally adopted PI children (43 female; 40 adolescents), and 81 participants were raised in their birth families and never adopted (NA) (40 female; 41 adolescents). Youth participated in a Modified Trier Social Stress Test (TSST-M, Yim et al., 2010) during which they gave a speech and performed mental arithmetic to an audience. Children prepared with parents in one condition and a supportive stranger in the other condition. Saliva samples were collected and the difference in cortisol from baseline to peak levels post-stressor was used in the current analyses as a measure of cortisol reactivity. Parents reported on their emotional support via the emotion coaching subscale of the Maternal Emotional Styles Questionnaire (MESQ; Lagace-Seguin & Coplan, 2005).

For PI youth, results revealed a significant condition by emotional support interaction (β = -.31, p =.04). The three-way interaction including age was not significant suggesting that the two-way interaction worked similarly for both PI children and adolescents. Probing of this interaction (see Figure 1) revealed that at low levels of emotional support, youth who prepared with a parent had higher cortisol reactivity than those who prepared with a stranger; at high levels of emotional support, PI youth who prepared with a parent had lower cortisol than youth who prepared with a stranger. A significant age by condition by emotional support interaction emerged for the NA group (β = -.10, p = .04). For NA children, the association between condition and cortisol reactivity did not differ depending on parental emotional support. For NA adolescents, at low levels of emotional support those who prepared with a parent had higher cortisol than those who prepared with a supportive stranger (see Figure 2), but when emotional support was just above average, adolescents who prepared with a parent had lower cortisol than children who prepared with a stranger

In sum our findings revealed that for parents to serve as an emotional buffer for PI children they need to be exceptionally high on emotional support. Our results also suggest that simply preparing with a parent is not enough for NA adolescents. Rather, the parent needs to be emotionally supportive.

Authors

• Nicole Perry, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Anna Johnson, St. Olaf College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Camelia E. Hostinar, University of California-Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Megan Gunnar, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author