Poster #8 - Socioeconomic Status Moderates Neural Markers of Cognitive Reappraisal Across Preschool

• In Event: Poster Session 16

Abstract

Emotion regulation (ER) is critical for children’s healthy socio-emotional development (Kopp, 1989), enabling the modulation of negative emotions that put children at risk for psychological disorders (Gross & John, 2003). Specifically, the cognitive ER strategy of reappraisal, the ability to change one’s interpretation of an event to influence its emotional impact (Gross, 1998), appears to protect children from developing symptoms of anxiety (Carthy et al., 2010) and depression (Kudinova et al., 2018). Despite widespread acceptance of its benefits for children’s long-term affective function, little is known about the developmental mechanisms that support reappraisal abilities in young children. In adults, reappraisal is visible at the neurobiological level as the moderation of amplitudes of the Late Positive Potential (LPP), a neural marker of individual differences in emotional reactivity (Cuthbert et al., 2000), across passive viewing and reappraisal tasks (MacNamara et al., 2009). Empirical studies using the LPP to study reappraisal in children are more equivocal, with some results mirroring adult findings in children as young as 4 (Hua et al., 2015) and other work reporting an absence of reappraisal effects (DeCicco et al., 2012). Inconsistencies may be due to a lack of consideration of individual differences in early experience, which affect neural development. We tested (N = 122) whether family socioeconomic status (SES) at age 3 and 4 moderated children’s ability to reappraise, as evidenced by the LPP, by age 5. Based on existing theory (Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016), we hypothesized that reappraisal would only be visible at lower levels of SES.
Parents self-reported SES as a composite of parent education and occupation (Hollingshead, 1975) at child ages 3 (M = 3.56) and 4 (M = 4.57). At age 5 (M = 5.52), EEG was recorded while children passively viewed a series of positive (n = 20), negative (n = 20), and neutral (n = 20) images. Children then viewed the same images, but were instructed to think about negative images in a more neutral manner (reappraisal condition).
Results suggested that, on average, the ability to reappraise was not visible as reductions in the LPP effect across passive view and reappraisal conditions (F(2,100) = 1.42, p = 0.24, np2 = 0.02). However, a significant interaction among trial type (positive, negative, neutral), condition (passive view, reappraisal) and SES suggested differences in the LPP effect across conditions related to SES (F(2,100) = 3.89, p = 0.02, np2 = 0.06). At high SES, the LPP effect was reduced in the reappraisal relative to the passive view condition (F(2,100) = 3.06, p = 0.05, np2 = 0.05], consistent with a traditional reappraisal effect on LPP. In contrast, at low SES there were no differences in the LPP effect across the passive view and reappraisal conditions (F(2,120) = 1.90, p = 0.15, np2 = 0.03). Inconsistent with hypotheses, results suggest that the ability to reappraisal is visible for children by age 5 when SES is high, but such an ability is not yet visible when SES is low.

Authors

• Jennifer Kling, Texas A&M University - College Station
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca J Brooker, Texas A&M University - College Station