Meta-Analytic Evidence for Mother-Child Synchrony in Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia and Moderation by Contextual Risk

• In Event: Parent-Child Biobehavioral Synchrony at Multiple Levels of Analysis

Abstract

Physiological synchrony, or correspondence in moment-to-moment fluctuations in physiological states, is an area of rapidly growing interest in developmental psychobiology. Biobehavioral frameworks of attachment have posited that mother-child physiological synchrony may reflect, in part, mutual responsivity in affect and behavior that is important for social bonding (Feldman, 2017). Parasympathetic nervous system activation as assessed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) has received considerable attention in the synchrony literature, leading to multiple systematic reviews (Davis et al., 2018; DePasquale, 2020). Here, we present a meta-analysis aimed at quantitatively evaluating the strength of evidence for mother-child RSA synchrony, and exploring whether mother-child RSA synchrony varies as a function of sample and methodological characteristics.
This meta-analysis summarizes evidence from 14 samples comprising 1,201 children ranging from infancy to adolescence and their mothers (see Figure 1). Our inclusion criteria were that studies had to: measure RSA in both mothers and their children; use within-dyad analyses of repeated RSA observations to measure concurrent synchrony; report unstandardized coefficients of mother-child synchrony, which are typically reported in multilevel modeling analyses; and include standard errors of unstandardized coefficients, or enough information to compute standard errors. If there were multiple studies on the same sample, we selected the most recently published study. We conducted a random-effects meta-analysis to test the overall association between moment-to-moment fluctuations in mother-child RSA (i.e., synchrony) and the amount of variability of synchrony across studies. We conducted mixed-effects meta-analyses to examine potential moderators of synchrony, including sample risk status (i.e., targeted participants with clinical diagnosis or difficulties, maltreatment history, or low socioeconomic status), task context (i.e., high versus low challenge), child age, and epoch length used to compute RSA. We also assessed evidence for publication bias and conducted outlier diagnostic tests.
We found a statistically significant, albeit modest, positive within-dyad association between mother and child fluctuations in RSA (b=.03, 95% CI[.01, .05], p=.002). There was also evidence for significant variability in mother-child RSA synchrony across studies (Q(13)=27.63, p=.010; I2=29.84). Less mother-child RSA synchrony was observed in high-risk samples characterized by exposure to maltreatment, risk for clinical difficulties, or socioeconomic disadvantage (b=-.05, 95% CI[-.09, -.00], p=.049). We did not find that mother-child RSA synchrony varied by task context, child age, or epoch length for computing RSA (all p>.084). Lastly, we did not find evidence for publication bias (Egger’s regression test z=1.10, p=.273 and symmetrical funnel plot) or outlier effects on our analysis (leave-one-out diagnostics of outliers; Viechtbauer & Cheung, 2010),
This is the first meta-analytic evidence for mother-child RSA synchrony. Mothers and their children, on average, show positive RSA synchrony such that increases and decreases in mother RSA correspond to simultaneous increases and decreases in child RSA. Importantly, the observed degree of synchrony is modest, which may be due to inconsistencies across studies. Our findings also provide support for the perspective that the strength of mother-child RSA synchrony is moderated by contextual risk factors. We will discuss some of the limitations of this meta-analysis and possibilities for strengthening future research on parent-child RSA synchrony.

Authors

• Jonas G Miller, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Emma Armstrong-Carter, Stanford University

• Leah Balter

• Julie A. Lorah, Clemson University