3-054 - The Contributions of Child Physiology and Parent-Child Interactions to Children’s Emotion Regulation Strategy Use

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The cutting-edge research in this symposium represents a needed first step toward clarifying the joint contributions of children’s psychophysiology and emotion-related parent-child interaction to children’s developing emotion regulation strategy use. Three talks leverage multi-method data to provide insight into the explicit and implicit emotion regulation strategies children use, spanning infancy to late childhood. Paper 1 describes a longitudinal study of infants’ parent-focused emotion regulation strategies during a stressful Still Face paradigm, and considers how physiology relates to the regulatory strategies infants employ in this context. Results show intriguing differences between infants’ physiology and emotion regulation strategies when interacting with fathers versus mothers. Paper 2 examines physiological coherence between parents and their 3- to 7-year-old children during a frustrating lab challenge. The dyadic physiology measured in this study provides an indirect measure of the extent to which children’s recovery from the distress evoked by the frustration task is influenced by parents’ own responses to the challenge. Paper 3 examines biased memory for emotional experiences as a new marker of problematic emotion regulation strategy use in 4- to 11-year-old children. Moreover, child physiology and parent-child emotional interactions are examined jointly to contextualize the conditions under which children with biased memory demonstrate heightened concurrent anxiety symptoms. Findings and insights from the three talks will be integrated by an expert discussant who will reflect on the important next steps for these research programs, and will identify and discuss the rich opportunities for future work in this area of developmental science.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Elizabeth L Davis, University of California, Riverside

Discussant

• Diane Lickenbrock, Western Kentucky University

Individual Presentations

• Infant Emotion Regulation with Mothers and Fathers: The Roles of Infant Temperament and Parent Psychopathology - Presenting Author: Ashley Nicole Quigley, Western Kentucky University; Non-Presenting Author: Diane Lickenbrock, Western Kentucky University

• Physiological Contagion in Parent-Child Dyads During an Emotional Challenge - Presenting Author: Emily Wu Shih, University of California, Riverside; Non-Presenting Author: Laura Quinones-Camacho, University of Pittsburgh; Non-Presenting Author: Alex Karan, University of California, Riverside; Non-Presenting Author: Elizabeth L Davis, University of California, Riverside

• Child Physiology and Parenting Contextualize When Children’s Biased Memory for Emotional Information Relates to Anxiety Symptoms - Presenting Author: Parisa Parsafar, University of California, Riverside; Non-Presenting Author: Emily Wu Shih, University of California, Riverside; Non-Presenting Author: Elizabeth L Davis, University of California, Riverside