Poster #58 - Concurrent and Lagged Grandmother–Child Physiological Synchrony Across Interaction Contexts: Links With Child Emotion Regulation

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Caregiver–child physiological synchrony, or the covarying physiological responses between caregivers and children during dyadic interaction, has been proposed to facilitate children’s development of self-regulation. For example, scientists have posited that responsive social interactions with caregivers can calm young children’s physiological states and may facilitate greater myelination of vagal fibers (Porges & Furman, 2011), which in turn, may improve the independent modulation of physiological arousal and facilitate better self-regulatory skills. The majority of existing literature focuses on parent-child synchrony, providing a limited understanding of children’s physiological coregulation with other primary caregivers. Within Chinese culture, grandparents are heavily involved in childrearing, with 60.1% of Chinese children being raised by at least one grandparent (Yue, 2018). Thus, a better understanding of the relation between grandparent–child physiological synchrony and Chinese children’s self-regulation is critical. The present study is the first to examine these associations.
Participants were 92 children (Mage = 8.97, 50.0% girls) and their grandmothers. All grandmothers reported that they were involved in rearing the children for more than 6 months in the past year. Grandmother and child respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were measured simultaneously throughout a 4-min cooperative Etch-A-Sketch (EAS) task and a 4-min conflict discussion task. Children were required to complete the Children’s Emotional Management Scales (CEMS).
A multilevel coupled autoregressive model (Lunkenhiemer et al., 2018) was employed to investigate whether grandparents and children displayed concurrent and lagged physiological synchrony in dyadic interaction contexts. RSA epochs were derived every 30 seconds during the EAS and conflict discussion and were analyzed separately for each task. For each dyad, concurrent synchrony was assessed by the effect of grandmother RSA on current child RSA in the child model and child RSA on current grandmother RSA in the grandmother model. Similarly, lagged synchrony was estimated by the effect of grandmother RSA on the next child RSA in the child model and child RSA on the next grandmother RSA in the grandmother model. The autoregressive effects of children’s or grandmothers’ previous RSA on current RSA were controlled for. Further, we examined the relation between grandmother–child synchrony and children’s reported emotion regulation via the anger inhibition, coping and dysregulation scales of the CEMS.
At the between-dyad level, the intercept coefficients for concurrent or lagged RSA synchrony were not significant, indicating no appearance of average synchrony across the present sample. However, concurrent and lagged RSA synchrony exhibited significant between-dyad variability, indicating that some grandmother-child dyads exhibited positive or negative synchrony. Furthermore, the relationship between grandparent-to-child synchrony and children’s emotion regulation varies depending on the context. During the EAS, grandmother-to-child lagged synchrony positively related to children’s anger inhibition and coping. During the conflict discussion, concurrent synchrony was negatively associated with children's anger inhibition and coping. These results suggest that grandmother’s influence on children’s physiological response in cooperative context may facilitate child emotion regulation while grandmother-child attunement in conflictual context may hinder child emotion regulation. The findings of this study highlight the importance of contextual physiological coregulation between Chinese children and their grandmothers for children’s social-emotional development.

Authors

• Yingying Tang, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Ting He, Beijing Normal University

• Nicole Perry, University of Texas at Austin

• Nan Zhou

• Qing Zhou, University of California - Berkeley

• Xiuyun Lin, Institute of Developmental Psychology