Good Mothers Brake Their Child’s Heart: Preschoolers’ Maternal Representations Predict Exclusion-Related Cardiac Slowing.

• In Event: 3-076 - Attachment and social cognition – a bio-psychological perspective from infancy to early adulthood.

Integrative Statement

Children’s internal representations of attachment figures are thought to guide behavior in new social encounters. On-line physiology collected during social interaction enables more direct real-time assessment of children’s representations, offering novel insights into the mechanism whereby representations impact future relationships and mental health. In a longitudinal study on 165 children, oversampled for emotional symptoms, we used the MacArthur Story-stem Battery to assess children’s representations of mothers (Robinson & Mantz-Simmons, 2003), the Child Behavior Questionnaire-Very Short Form (Rothbart et al., 2001) to assess temperament dimensions of negative affectivity and effortful control during preschool (Mean age = 5.19 years), and the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment interview (PAPA; Egger & Angold, 2004) to assess preschool depressive symptoms. This was followed by a school-age assessment (Mean age = 8.42 years) involving multi-informant reports on peer problems (mother, father, teacher) and depressive symptoms (mother-report, child-report, PAPA). We sampled EKG data while children played the computerized ball-toss game (Cyberball) with two unfamiliar peers which progressed from inclusion (children received the ball regularly) to exclusion (children received the ball rarely). During “not-my-turn” events (not receiving the ball) we contrasted event-related cardiac deceleration in the exclusion vs. inclusion phases using a latent difference score approach (Bush & Obradovic, 2013). Cardiac deceleration represents a marker of error processing and cognitive monitoring when outcomes are more negative than expected (e.g., van der Molen, 2000; Sokolov, 1963), such as during social rejection (see Gunther Moor et al., 2010). Extending prior work using event-related potentials (White et al., 2012), we anticipated increased cardiac deceleration during exclusion vs. inclusion events among children with more positive maternal representations at preschool-age independent of negative affectivity and effortful control. Moreover, we hypothesized an indirect pathway from more positive preschool maternal representations through greater cardiac deceleration to fewer school-age peer problems and, in turn, fewer depressive symptoms. As predicted, preschoolers’ positive mother representations predicted increased cardiac deceleration upon not-my-turn during exclusion vs. inclusion independent of preschool verbal competence, negative affectivity, and effortful control as well as household income (see Figure 1 for an illustration using median-split). Cardiac slowing mediated the effect of representations on peer problems (95% CI: -.505 to -.075, p = .008) which, in turn, mediated the decrease of depressive symptoms from preschool to school-age (sequential mediation: positive maternal representationincreased cardiac slowingfewer peer problemsfewer depressive symptoms; 95% CI: -.347 to -.011, p = .036; see Figure 2). We conclude that positive representations of caregivers confer a generalized positive social expectancy that becomes violated upon exclusion by unfamiliar peers. In turn, these expectancies may function akin to self-fulfilling prophecies, if more positive protecting, but if less positive predisposing children to peer problems in new settings, such as school, and depressive symptoms. Using a physiological marker of expectancies, our study provides some of the first direct evidence for a mechanism whereby preschoolers’ internal working models of caregivers guide cognition during new social encounters at school-age, in turn, impacting peer relationships and mental health.

Authors

• Lars O. White, University of Leipzig
  Presenting Author

• Boris Bornemann, Max-Planck-Instituts für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften, Leipzig
  Non-Presenting Author

• Annette Klein, University of Leipzig
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael J Crowley, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kai von Klitzing, University of Leipzig
  Non-Presenting Author