Poster #8 - Mother-Infant RSA Synchrony and Infant Stress Recovery Over the First Year

• In Event: Poster Session 19

Abstract

Infants are exposed to mild social stressors (e.g., unavailability of caregivers) on a daily basis, and the ability to recover from these stressors is considered a hallmark for early socioemotional development (DiCorcia & Tronick, 2011). Over the first year of life, infants learn to regulate stress through mother-infant interaction. According to the bio-behavioral synchrony model (Feldman, 2007, 2012), physiological synchrony is one of the biological mechanisms underlying mother-infant coregulatory processes, through which infants’ emotional functioning develops and consolidates. Specifically, the synchronized physiology between mothers and their infants provides online support for infants’ immature regulatory systems to meet their emotional needs and promote early development of stress regulation over time. The only prior study linking physiological synchrony to infant stress recovery showed that 4- to 6-month-old infants, especially those who are not able to show adaptive physiological response to stressors on their own, exhibited more decreases in distress following a stressor if their parasympathetic activity was positively synchronized with the mother’s during normal play (Abney et al., 2021). Longitudinal studies are needed to understand both short- and long-term implications of mother-infant physiological synchrony for infant stress recovery.
In this study, we aim to examine the extent to which mother-infant physiological synchrony in a positive play context is related to infant (a) behavioral and (b) physiological stress recovery across 3, 6, and 9 months using the still-face paradigm (SFP). We hypothesize that infants who display more positive physiological synchrony with their mothers during the SFP play at a given time point will show more (a) behavioral recovery (i.e., increases in positive social engagement) and (b) physiological recovery [i.e., increases in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)] from the still-face to reunion episode at the concurrent and subsequent time points.
Participants were 102 mother-infant dyads (45 girls). At 3, 6, and 9 months, the SFP was conducted and video-recorded. Infants’ facial expressions, vocalizations, and directions of gaze were coded on a frame-by-frame (33ms/frame) basis and were then integrated into affective engagement states (see Table 1). From these infant engagement states, we will compute infant behavioral stress recovery as the change in the proportion of infant social engagement (i.e., activity engagement + social monitoring + positive engagement) from the still-face to reunion episode at each time point. Infant and maternal RSA levels will be calculated across 1-s intervals from ECG data collected during the SFP. Infant RSA recovery will be computed as the change in average RSA levels from the still-face to reunion episode at each time point.
Two-level coupled autoregressive models will be fitted to extract mother-infant RSA synchrony (i.e., the extent to which infant and maternal RSA levels, respectively, vary as a function of the partner’s RSA levels at the within-dyad level) during the play at each time point. Further, associations between RSA synchrony and concurrent and subsequent infant stress recovery across 3, 6, and 9 months will be tested using random intercepts cross-lagged panel models (see Figure 1), and infant behavioral stress recovery and RSA recovery will be tested in separate models.

Authors

• Yannan Hu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Nancy McElwain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign