Leveraging Wearable Sensors to Access Processes of Children’s Everyday Behavioral and Physiological Regulation

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

The challenges for childrens’ regulation in everyday contexts are complex and varied. For example, infant emotion regulation is highly dependent on the presence of caregivers, whose availability may vary as they juggle other responsibilities at home. Older children must learn to control impulses and stay on-task across varied situations - including meals, unstructured play, and trips to the grocery store - with varying degrees of structure, noise, and opportunities to move or engage with peers.

Such everyday experiences are theorized to build children’s regulation skills (Bronfenbrenner, 1976). However, they are not possible to characterize in traditional structured laboratory assessments (Dahl, 2017). In the current symposium, we present four papers that leverage wearable sensors to capture children’s regulation as experienced in everyday contexts. Such representative data of regulation experiences can lead to more robust predictions of early childhood outcomes. Additionally, repeated instances of regulation captured by sensors over hours or days can lead to new theories about the within-person processes underlying trajectories of regulation in infancy and childhood.

The current symposium will explore these themes, drawing out their implications for research and interventions. All four papers will share rich data from wearable sensors -including heart rate monitors, accelerometers, head-mounted cameras, and child-worn audio recorders- to capture markers of regulation in everyday settings. Our papers represent researchers studying infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Overall, our symposium showcases the exciting possibilities opened up by wearable technologies as well as the need to assess between- and especially within-person variability in behavioral regulation in rich ecologically valid contexts.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Kaya de Barbaro, University of Texas at Austin

Individual Presentations

• Detecting Toddler Emotion Regulation from Sequential Patterns of Everyday Emotional and Verbal Communication - Presenting Author: Margaret A. Fields-Olivieri, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Kristin Jennings, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Crystal Thinzar, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Variation in Everyday Caregiver Sensitivity Predicts Infants’ Real-Time Physiological Regulation - Presenting Author: Anna Madden-Rusnak, University of Texas at Austin; Megan Micheletti, University of Texas at Austin; Brandon Thint; Priyanka Khante, University of Texas at Austin; Xuewen Yao; Kaya de Barbaro, University of Texas at Austin

• Self-Regulation in School: An Investigation of 4-5-year-old Children’s Self-Regulation in Indoor and Outdoor Learning Environments - Presenting Author: Molly Atkinson, The University of East London Baby Development Lab; Gemma Goldenberg, University of East London; Senanur Zengin, Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University; Sam V Wass, University of East London

• Uncovering Variability in Children’s Classroom Behavioral Regulation Using Wearable Accelerometers - Presenting Author: Andrew E. Koepp, University of Texas at Austin; Elizabeth T. Gershoff, University of Texas at Austin