Child Physiology and Parenting Contextualize When Children’s Biased Memory for Emotional Information Relates to Anxiety Symptoms

• In Event: 3-054 - The Contributions of Child Physiology and Parent-Child Interactions to Children’s Emotion Regulation Strategy Use

Integrative Statement

Memory biases that prioritize the gist of a negative experience at the expense of details are common among adults with distress disorders like anxiety/depression and may index emotional dysregulation. Little is known about the association between memory biases and psychopathology in childhood. We investigated whether children’s memory biases related to concurrent anxiety symptoms, and, using a biopsychosocial framework, tested parent and child characteristics as moderators of this association. Parents’ emotion socialization influences how children experience their own negative emotions (Eisenberg et al., 1996), and carries consequences for what they subsequently remember about emotional experiences. But, children’s physiology (e.g., respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) has been shown to qualify the effect of parent emotion socialization (Perry et al., 2011). Thus, we tested children’s physiology and parent reactions to children’s emotions as moderators of the potential relation between memory and anxiety symptoms in childhood.
184 children (3.83-11.75 years; M = 7.666, SD = 2.302; 94 girls) participated with a parent. We were specifically interested in parents’ use of emotion minimization, measured via the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotion Scale (Fabes et al.,1990). We used the total score from the parent-report of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (Birmaher et al.,1995), and collected RSA from children during a 5-min resting baseline. Children watched a short negative emotional film clip, and memory for information from the clip was later tested via cued recall (5 Central; 5 Peripheral questions). Peripheral memory scores were subtracted from Central scores to capture memory bias. Positive scores reflect a greater bias to remember emotionally central (gist) versus detailed information from the film.

We ran a regression controlling for children’s age, sex, receptive vocabulary, and design elements of the larger study. Key predictors were children’s resting RSA, memory bias, and parent minimization (entered in step 2) and the two- and three-way interactions (steps 3 and 4). The final model step was significant and improved fit. There were no significant covariates. The 3-way interaction was significant, B = -1.315, t = -3.306, p = .0013 95%CI [-2.103, -.527]. Anxiety symptoms were higher among children with a greater bias to remember emotionally central information, when resting RSA was low and parents reported greater minimizing, B = 2.343, t = 2.999, p = .0033, 95% CI [.797, 3.890]. In contrast, anxiety symptoms were lower for children with a greater bias to remember central information who had higher resting RSA, even when parents reported more minimization, B = 1.519, t = -2.069, p = .0407, 95% CI [-2.972, - .0655]. Memory bias did not relate to anxiety for children whose parents endorsed less minimizing, regardless of whether children’s resting RSA was lower, B = -1.395, t = -1.775, p = .079, CI [-2.951, .161] or higher, B = .681, t = .830, p = .408, 95% CI [-.943, 2.306].

This study demonstrates a link between memory bias (an implicit emotion regulation strategy) and concurrent anxiety symptoms in childhood, and illustrates that this association is qualified by emotion-related moderators that are common in children’s lives.

Authors

• Parisa Parsafar, University of California, Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Emily Wu Shih, University of California, Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth L Davis, University of California, Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author