Anger, psychophysiology and story: the role of RSA in emotionally adaptive narration

• In Event: Developmental psychophysiology and developmental psychopathology: Temporal and contextual considerations

Abstract

Because anger is a recurrent and enduring emotion throughout childhood and adolescence (e.g., Sears, Repetti, Reynolds, & Sperling, 2014; Von Salisch & Vogelgesang, 2005; Fabes, Eisenberg, McCormick, & Wilson, 1988), children’s strategies for coping with anger represent an important aspect of their emotional development. Interpersonal conflict is considered to be the most common cause of anger in children (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Novaco, 2016), and following provocation, children are faced with the difficult task of managing their anger. Recent studies show that narration may be an effective way for youth to do that, both in the moment and in more lasting ways (Wainryb et al., 2018). Specifically, when youth construct a narrative about an anger-inducing event rich in psychological elaboration (Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010), narration is associated with a reduction in distress caused by that event.

The goal of this study is to understand how one psychophysiological mechanism, RSA, may be related youth’s tendency to engage in psychological elaboration in the face of an angry memory. Previous findings examining psychophysiological responding in children converge to suggest that youth who exhibit an RSA-rebound pattern in response to negative-emotion-eliciting tasks (e.g., emotional videos, emotional conversations) report themselves and are described by their parents as more adept at emotion regulation, compared to youth who do not display this pattern (Calkins & Keane, 2004; Cui et al., 2015; Hessler & Fainsilber Katz, 2007). Based on this literature, we hypothesize that youth who respond to an angry memory with higher levels of RSA responding will be more likely to engage in psychological processing during narration, and thus to experience decreases in the feeling of anger following narration.

Participants were 114 youths between the ages of 8 and 17. Self-reported anger ratings were obtained once prior to elicitation of the event, and four more times throughout the protocol. Specifically, participants were asked to rate (1=not at all, 5=very,very), “How mad are you feeling right now?”. The narrative feature of psychological elaboration was coded using the following scale (0=absent/minimal, 1=adequate, 2=moderate, 3=complete) and an interrater reliability coefficient of .86 was obtained. RSA was assessed through continuous recordings of ECG and respiration data.

Our main analysis will consist of a multiple linear regression to assess if RSA responding during initial exposure to the memory explains significantly more variance of psychological exploration during narration than age, intensity of recalled events, and amount of time that has passed since the event occurred. If our hypothesis is confirmed, the data would suggest that initial RSA responding to memories is related to youth’s ability to narrate those events in emotionally adaptive ways, suggesting a role for RSA responding in behavioral emotion regulation. Further, this study would link physiology and behavior in a tighter, more simultaneous way. Much of the literature on physiological responding and behavior links RSA collected in one situation and behavior assessed later, in a different situation (e.g., parent report). Our findings would provide the literature with a much clearer picture of how physiology influences behavior immediately after RSA withdrawal.

Authors

• Kristina L Oldroyd, Utah Valley University
  Presenting Author

• Monisha Pasupathi, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author

• CECILIA WAINRYB, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author