Poster #130 - Children’s Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia: Links With Sympathy and Prosocial Behaviors

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

The parasympathetic nervous system has long been implicated in the development of other-oriented emotions and behaviors in childhood. Parasympathetic nervous system activity is commonly assessed using respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), which is a measure of the vagus nerve’s effect on heartbeat. In children, higher resting RSA has been theorized to be associated with increased prosociality (Porges & Furman, 2011). Recently, however, Miller, Kahle, and Hastings (2017) found evidence that in early childhood, moderate resting RSA is most highly associated with prosociality, measured using composite scores of sympathy and prosocial behavior. It may be that physiological over-arousal leads to higher personal distress resulting in self-focus, while under-arousal may be associated with a lack of distress making it more difficult for the child to focus on others (Miller et al., 2017). To further explore the relation between resting RSA and prosociality, the present study assessed children across early to middle childhood and measured sympathy and prosocial behaviors separately using multiple informants. An ethnically diverse sample of 300 Canadian 4- (Mage = 4.53, SD = 0.30, 50% girls) and 8-year-old children (Mage = 8.52, SD = 0.27, 50% girls) and their caregivers participated in the study. Children’s resting RSA was measured with Biopac MP150 data acquisition system (sampling rate at 2 kHz) during a calming 2-minute video of a turtle swimming. After which, they were asked by an experimenter about their feelings of sympathy and prosocial behaviors (sympathy scale by Eisenberg et al., 1996; prosocial subscale taken from SDQ, Goodman, 1997). Parents filled out the same sympathy and prosocial scales about their children in the waiting room. Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics by age for all study variables. We ran hierarchical linear regressions to assess resting RSA’s relation to the other-oriented variables; step 1 controlled for gender, step 2 added the linear RSA term, and step 3 added the quadratic RSA term (RSA^2). For 4-year-olds, we did not find a relation between resting RSA and child-reported or parent-reported sympathy or prosocial behaviors. For 8-year-olds, we found a quadratic and linear relation (inverted-U shaped curve with positive skew) between resting RSA and child- (p < 0.05) and parent-reported (p < 0.05) sympathy and child- (p < 0.05) and parent-reported (p < 0.10) prosocial behavior (See Figure 1). This indicates that moderate resting RSA in 8-year-olds, is concurrently associated with higher sympathy and prosocial behaviors. Our results provide further support that over- and under-arousal of the parasympathetic system may inhibit children’s ability to respond to the distress of others, however, this relation may depend on developmental age. These findings indicate that theories regarding the biological foundations of other-oriented responding in children may need to be updated to reflect the growing evidence that moderate parasympathetic activity is optimal for prosociality.

Authors

• Erinn Acland, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Tyler Colasante, University of Toronto at Mississauga
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author