Influences of Poverty-Related Risk and Physiological Stress on Childhood Self-Regulation: Mediation through Infant Attention

• In Event: 1-087 - Connecting environmental experience to the emergence of self-regulation: Insights from typical and atypical populations

Integrative Statement

Increasingly, self-regulation is considered to be a critical component of healthy child development (Blair & Razza, 2007; Blair et al., 2015). Existing literature demonstrates that children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds are more likely to have reduced self-regulation abilities at school entry (Blair 2010; Evans and Kim 2013; Raver 2004). Notably, early manifestations of self-regulation, such as attention, undergo considerable development in the first few years of life and are highly susceptible to the influence of early-life adversity and stress (Arnsten, 2009; Grossmann, 2013; Hodel, 2018). However, few studies have explicitly examined attention in infancy as a mechanism linking early-life poverty and stress to self-regulation in early childhood. Therefore, the goal of the present work was to examine how infant attention mediated the effects of early-life poverty-related adversity and physiological markers of stress relate on self-regulation in early childhood. Specifically, we examined infant attention at 15 and 24 months of age as a potential mediator by which early-life poverty-related risk and physiological stress predicted self-regulation in Pre-Kindergarten (PreK). Data for this analysis come from The Family Life Project (Vernon-Feagans, Cox, & Investigators, 2013), a large prospective longitudinal sample (N=1,292) of children and families living in predominantly low-income and non-urban communities. At child ages 7 and 15 months, families were visited in their homes and primary caregivers reported socioeconomic and demographic information. Saliva samples were also collected from infants and assayed for cortisol as an index of basal physiological stress. Cumulative measures of poverty-related risk and cortisol were created by averaging each respective measure across 7 and 15 months. At child ages 15 and 24 months, attention was observed and coded by a research assistant during the home visit using the Infant Behavior Record (IBR; Bayley, 1969) and the Early Attention to Reading Situations (EARS; Feagans, Kipp, & Blood, 1994) task. At PreK, three domains of self-regulation were measured: directly assessed executive function, and teacher reported effortful control and emotion regulation. We used structural equation modeling to assess whether infant attention mediated the effects of cumulative poverty-related risk and cumulative cortisol on self-regulation. Results indicated that attention was negatively associated with poverty-related risk (β=-.263, SE = 0.049, p<.001) and cortisol (β=-.149, SE = .46, p<.001). Further, attention was positively associated with self-regulation in PreK (β=.353, SE =.066, p<.001). The mediation analysis indicated that attention partially mediated the relation between poverty-related risk and self-regulation (β=-.093, 95% CI [-.12, -.068]) and fully mediated the relation between cortisol and self-regulation (β=-.053, 95% CI [-.073, -.033]). These results provide support for a developmental model of self-regulation in which attention in infancy acts as a mechanism linking the effects of early-life physiological stress and socioeconomic risk with self-regulation in early childhood. Moreover, this study highlights attention as an early precursor of self-regulation abilities that may be malleable and therefore serve as a focus for efforts to promote adaptive child development in the infant and toddler periods.

Group Authors

Family Life Project Key Investigators

Authors

• Annie Brandes-Aitken, Department of Applied Psychology, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Stephen H. Braren, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Clancy Blair, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author