Poster #21 - Mother-toddler co-regulation of negative emotions in younger siblings of autistic children with diverse developmental outcomes

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Emotion regulation (ER), or the ability to modulate emotions in service of one’s goals, is an essential developmental task that begins in infancy. In the first 3-5 years of life, ER is largely a dyadic process, involving parent and child coregulation of emotion. Parents facilitate the development of child ER by responding to children’s negative emotions in ways that help children regulate (e.g., comforting, redirecting, prompting). Challenges with ER are common in autistic individuals, and evidence suggests that these challenges start early in life (Clifford et al., 2013). Despite the importance of early co-regulation, little is known about how co-regulation in parent-child dyads with an autistic child may differ from coregulation in dyads with a neurotypical child. Research generally suggests that parents of autistic children are as sensitive and responsive to their children as parents of neurotypical children (Hirschler-Guttenberg et al., 2015), however, no prior study has specifically compared parents of autistic vs. neurotypical children on the use of coregulation strategies. The current study examines instances of negative affect in a sample of 18-month-olds with diverse developmental outcomes and the coregulation strategies used by their caregivers.

39 18-month-old infants at elevated likelihood (EL) of autism (by virtue of having an older sibling with autism) were videorecorded during everyday activities with their caregivers at home for 45 minutes. Infants were evaluated at 36 months and classified with an autism diagnosis (EL-ASD; n=11), language delay without ASD (EL-LD; n=12), or no delay or diagnosis (EL-ND; n=16). Videos were coded in 10 second intervals. Negative affect was identified and categorized as either low/moderate intensity (i.e., mild facial negativity, vocalizations of frustration or negativity) or high intensity (i.e., crying, screaming, facial anger or distress). Within each interval containing negative affect, all caregiver coregulation strategies were coded (i.e., redirection, physical comfort, vocal comfort, problem solving).

Although groups did not differ significantly in the total amount of negative affect they displayed, EL-ASD infants had a higher proportion of high intensity negative affect than their EL-ND peers (p < 0.05; Figure 1). There were no differences between groups in the likelihood that the caregiver provided a coregulation response or in the total number of coregulation strategies used in each negative affect interval (ps > 0.05; Table 1). With regard to specific coregulation strategies, EL-LD caregivers used problem solving strategies (e.g., prompting, helping) significantly less often than EL-ND caregivers (p < 0.05; Table 1). There were no other significant differences between outcome groups.

Results suggest that ER challenges in autistic children are apparent early in life, even prior to the typical age of diagnosis. Parents of children in all outcome groups were highly responsive to their children’s negative affect, and few differences emerged in the coregulation strategies they used. Future work will use time-series data to examine how child negative affect and parent coregulation strategies influence each other in real time.

Authors

• Kaitlyn B Cortez, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Jana M Iverson, Boston University

• Jessie Bolz Northrup