Poster #67 - Interactive Risk of Sympathovagal Balance and Interparental Conflict for Poor Emotion Understanding in Early Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 04

Abstract

Difficulties with emotion understanding (i.e., ability to identify emotions based on contextual cues) is a risk factor for later psychological problems (e.g., Johnson et al., 2017). Thus, an important next step in the literature is to identify the developmental antecedents of poor emotion understanding in early childhood. Although conceptual models have emphasized the significance of family and child characteristics as key sources of emotion socialization for children (Morris et al., 2007), much of the work has focused on how parenting practices and child socio-cognitive attributes relate to emotion understanding (e.g., Kårstad et al., 2015; Perlman et al., 2008). Thus, little is known about how characteristics in the broader family context and child physiological attributes may operate individually or interact as antecedents of emotion understanding. To address this significant gap, the aim of this study was to examine interparental conflict (IPC), children’s physiological reactivity and their interplay as predictors of emotion understanding in early childhood.

The sample consisted of 238 preschool children (Mage = 4.39 years; 52.3% girls) and their parents. Data were collected in two waves, one year apart. Trained coders rated parental anger escalation and aggression in a videotaped parental disagreement task following established procedures (Gordis et al., 1997) At Wave 1, we calculated the ratio of sympathetic (i.e., pre-ejection period or PEP) to parasympathetic (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia or RSA) reactivity to a socio-cognitive stressor (i.e., sympathovagal balance). Finally, children’s emotion knowledge was measured through the Assessment of Children’s Emotion Skills (ACES; Schultz et al., 2004) and Schultz Test of Emotion Processing (STEP-P; Schultz et al., 2010) at both waves.

Structural equation models were examined in which IPC, sympathovagal balance, and their interaction at wave 1 predicted child emotion understanding at wave 2 after controlling for wave 1 emotion understanding. The models fit the data well. Higher sympathovagal balance (i.e., increased PEP activity relative to RSA) was associated with decreased emotion understanding in the model predicting ACES (β = -0.16, p = .025) and STEP-P (β = -0.20, p = .006). A significant interaction also emerged between IPC and sympathovagal balance in predicting ACES (see Figure 1). Simple slope analyses revealed that children with lower sympathovagal balance displayed more emotion knowledge than those with higher sympathovagal balance, regardless of IPC experiences (see Figure 2).

Although increased sympathetic and decreased parasympathetic activity has shown to be beneficial in stressful contexts and associated with more desirable outcomes (e.g., Roubinov et al., 2021), the present findings indicate that lower sympathovagal balance may be adaptive for young children with regards to their emotional development. The influence of autonomic activity on emotional development may depend on the type of stress being experienced. For instance, it is possible that a lack of coordination between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems during times of socio-cognitive stress promotes children’s emotion understanding and knowledge, but this may not be true for other stressors. Further work is required to unveil the influence of IPC and autonomic activity on emotional development in early childhood.

Authors

• Kassidy Colton, University of Rochester
  Presenting Author

• Patrick Davies, University of Rochester

• Mona M El-Sheikh, Auburn University