1-190 - Linking Family Emotion Socialization, Behavior, and Physiological Processes: Reward, Relationships, and Positive Contexts

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Emotion socialization within the family shapes children’s and youths’ responses to situational demands both behaviorally and physiologically. Psychophysiology underlies diverse processes including reward processing, the “fight or flight” response, and prosocial behavior. Studies that link multiple domains (physiological processes and behaviors, and their relations to socialization) are key to refining conceptualizations of typical and atypical development of socioemotional well-being. This symposium consists of three presentations that examine the contributions of socialization to diverse physiological processes (central nervous system and autonomic nervous system activity), and their associations with youths’ behaviors.
In Presentation 1, feedback negativity was examined as a neural response to reward in youth with and without parental history of depression, which plays a significant role in shaping youths’ reward processing. Results show differences between youth on responses to positive and negative emotions and suggest that high-risk youth first show an amplified, and later a dampened, neural response. Presentation 2 shows the linkage between mothers’ and daughters’ sympathetic nervous system activity in two different emotion contexts. Sympathetic arousal transmission and attenuation were associated with physical and relationship closeness. Extending to a whole-family analysis, children’s parasympathetic nervous system activity was examined as a moderator between parents’ emotional expressiveness and children’s prosocial behavior during sibling interactions in Presentation 3. Together, these three presentations demonstrate the importance of links among multiple physiological processes and behavioral responses that are an important component of socioemotional well-being. A leading expert in the role of developmental psychophysiological processes will integrate the findings of the three presentations.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Jessica P. Lougheed, Pennsylvania State University

Discussant

• Nicholas B. Allen, University of Oregon

Individual Presentations

• Neural Correlates of Reward Processing in Youth at High and Low Familial Risk for Depression - Presenting Author: Lauren M Bylsma, University of Pittsburgh, Department of Psychiatry; Cecile D. Ladouceur, University of Pittsburgh

• Arousal Transmission in Mother-Daughter Dyads in Negative and Positive Emotion Contexts - Presenting Author: Jessica P. Lougheed, Pennsylvania State University; Tom Hollenstein, Queen's University

• Prosocial Behavior in the Family System: Contributions of Parental Emotional Expressiveness and Child Physiological Regulation - Presenting Author: Leigha A MacNeill, The Pennsylvania State University; Koraly Perez-Edgar, The Pennsylvania State University; Alysia Y. Blandon, Pennsylvania State University