Processes contributing to impaired regulatory responses after childhood trauma

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Research in developmental psychopathology has underscored the importance of examining the diverse and multisystemic pathways contributing to resilience and psychopathology in the wake of exposure to traumatic events. At the individual level, one central transdiagnostic process that has been underscored as especially relevant is the processes whereby individuals regulate their responses to traumatic events. To date, however, the research on regulatory processes in children, including attention regulation, fear response, and self-regulation is underdeveloped relative to the adult literature. Further, much extant research in these domains focuses on typically developing samples, rather than on children exposed to chronic forms of violence and trauma. This panel presents a series of three manuscripts examining three unique samples of children exposed to violence and trauma, including IPV and community violence. Each study also employs a unique methodological approach to studying children’s regulatory responses to traumatic or threatening events, including a cognitive attention bias task, EMG assessment during a fear extinction paradigm, and parent-child emotion socialization. The studies examine potential contributions of these underlying individual and familial processes on children’s psychological functioning, including in the domains of self-regulation, posttraumatic stress, internalizing symptoms, and prosocial skills. Across studies, results indicated that regulatory processes may operate in unanticipated ways, with avoidance and suppression of fear responses associated with adaptive outcomes in some individual and relational contexts but not others. These findings suggest the critical importance of multi-method, integrative research and highlight the importance of evaluating moderating factors in the association between trauma and psychopathology.

Sub Unit

• Developmental Psychopathology

Chair

• Laura Miller-Graff, University of Notre Dame

Individual Presentations

• Effect of Depressive Symptoms on Fear Extinction in Urban Youth - Presenting Author: Mariam Reda, Wayne State Medicine; Non-Presenting Author: Anais Fern Stenson, Wayne State University; Non-Presenting Author: Charis Wiltshire, Wayne State School of Medicine; Non-Presenting Author: Cassandra Wanna, Wayne State School of Medicine; Non-Presenting Author: Sean Minton, Emory University School of Medicine; Non-Presenting Author: Sterling Winters, Wayne State School of Medicine; Non-Presenting Author: John M France, Wayne State University; Non-Presenting Author: William M Davie, Wayne State School of Medicine; Non-Presenting Author: Tanja Jovanovic, Wayne State University

• Intimate partner violence and preschool self-regulation: Examining the role of maternal emotion socialization - Presenting Author: Renee Lamoreau, Tulane University; Non-Presenting Author: Jae eun Park, University of Notre Dame; Non-Presenting Author: Hilary Skov, Tulane University; Non-Presenting Author: Victoria Ross Parker, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Sarah A.O. Gray, Tulane University

• Attentional bias toward threat: Variations by stimulus types and implications for socioemotional functioning - Presenting Author: Laura Miller-Graff, University of Notre Dame; Non-Presenting Author: Caroline R Scheid, University of Notre Dame; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica R. Carney, University of Notre Dame