Poster #70 - The Longitudinal Effects of Biological and Social Predictors on Early Childhood Emotion Regulation

• In Event: Poster Session 11

Abstract

Emotion regulation (ER) is an important skill to acquire during childhood. Children who have difficulty with ER might develop negative outcomes, such as internalizing and externalizing disorders (Lengua, 2003). ER begins to refine during early childhood (Thompson, 1994) and both biological and social have been shown to affect the development of ER. Biological factors include higher levels of negative affect (NA; Thomas et al., 2017) and lower levels of baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (bRSA; Gentzler et al., 2009), and social factors include high levels of maternal intrusiveness (mINT; Graziano & Keane, 2011). Existing work has demonstrated that these variables might interact in predicting ER, but much of this work has been concurrent during infancy or early childhood (e.g., Calkins et al., 2004; Hassan et al., 2017; Morasch et al., 2012). Thus, the goal of the present study was to examine how these interactive effects during infancy and toddlerhood might longitudinally predict ER during early childhood.

Participants included 183 mother-child dyads who visited the lab when children were 10-, 24-, and 36-months old. At 10-months, bRSA was recorded and mothers reported child NA using the Child Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart et al., 2001). At 24-months, mINT was coded during several interaction tasks between the dyads. At age 36-months mothers reported on child Emotional Control and Inhibition using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function-Preschool version (Roth, 2005) and a composite score was created from these two subscales to create an Inhibitory Self Control Index (ISCI) for our measure of ER, with higher scores indicating more difficulties with ER. Hierarchical regression was used to predict child ER at 36-months using child bRSA and NA from 10-months (Step 1) and mINT from 24-months (Step 2). A third step was added to the model to examine interactive effects and included interaction terms between bRSA and mINT and between NA and mINT.

Step 1 of the model was significant [F(2,180) = 3.91, R2 = .042, p = .02] and 10-month NA predicted 36-month ER (ß = .09, p = .01). Step 3 of the model was also significant [F(2,177) = 3.80, ∆R2 = .039, p = .02]. In Step 3, the direct effect of NA on ER was lost, but the interaction term between bRSA and mINT was significant (Table 1). This interaction was probed using PROCESS (Hayes, 2022), which demonstrated a significant moderating effect of mINT on the association between bRSA and ER, so that children who had a high bRSA at age 10-months had poorer ER at age 36-months, but only when mINT was high at 24-months.

These results suggest that both maternal and child factors are important in predicting child ER. Specifically, biological predictors of ER, like bRSA, alone are not enough in considering the development of ER in early childhood and should be combined with social predictors, such as maternal behaviors. As ER is beginning to refine during early childhood and continues to develop, it is important to understand how these predictors might interact in order to help prevent negative outcomes.

Authors

• Jennifer Julia Phillips, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  Presenting Author

• John H Hunter, Virginia Tech

• Martha Ann Bell, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University