Toddlers’ Responses to Arm Restraint: Anger Reactivity and Regulation

• In Event: 3-109 - Understanding Processes underlying Children's Emotional Development and Emotion Regulation Using Intensive Longitudinal Approaches

Integrative Statement

Children use a variety of behaviors to regulate anger, some more effective than others. For example, during infancy and toddlerhood, distraction and approach have been linked to reduced anger (Buss & Goldsmith, 1998), whereas avoidance and support seeking were associated with increases in anger during laboratory tasks (Stifter & Braungart, 1995). In an attempt to improve upon past studies using aggregated measures of behavior across a series of observations, we assessed emotion as a dynamic process between regulatory and emotion expressive behaviors (Cole et al., 2004). We also explored whether child heritable risks for externalizing problems explain the links between regulatory and emotion expressive behaviors. These associations were examined using a parent-offspring adoption design, enabling us to clarify the causal pathways by which the dynamic process may operate.

Multilevel modeling was used to examine lagged associations between regulatory behaviors and anger expressions during an arm restraint task. Participants were children (N = 433) aged 27 months from the Early Growth and Development Study (Leve et al., 2013), a longitudinal adoption study of children placed at or near birth and their families. The arm restraint task included five 30-second episodes in which playing with toy (3 times) was rotated with episodes of arm restraint (twice). Only the first arm restraint episode was used here. Behaviors were coded second-by-second (see Roben et al., 2012) and collapsed into 3-second intervals. Anger was coded as the presence and intensity of anger expressions. Regulatory behaviors were coded as support-seeking (e.g., look towards mother), attempt-to-escape (e.g., struggling), distraction (e.g., look away), and focus-on-restraint (e.g., look at mom’s arms). Child heritable risks for externalizing problems were generated using birth parents’ lifetime psychiatric diagnoses, current symptoms, and first-degree relatives’ lifetime psychiatric diagnoses.

During the restaint, significant autoregressive effects were evident for anger (β = .75, p < .001), indicating that children’s anger carried over to the next 3-second interval. We also found substantial between-individual differences in level of anger (ϭanger = .21, 95% CI = [.17, .26]). Support-seeking and attempt-to-escape predicted an increase in anger in the next 3-second interval (βsupportseeking = .09, βattempttoescape = .23, ps < .001). The random effect for these within-person associations were significant (ϭsupportseeking = .28, with 95% CI = [.20, .38]; ϭattempttoescape = .24, 95% CI = [.17, .33]), indicating that the within-person associations between support-seeking, attempt-to-escape and anger varied across individuals. Distraction and focus-on-restraint were not associated with anger at the next 3-second interval. Heritable risks for externalizing problems were positively associated with the anger (β = .27, p < .01).

Support-seeking and attempt-to-escape increased anger in this context, likely because the behaviors did not end the restraint. Children at higher heritable risk showed higher levels of anger expression. The within-person associations between regulatory behaviors and anger expressions differed across individuals. These individual differences may be explained by factors other than heritable risk, such as child effortful control. Additional analyses will examine whether child effortful control and overreactive parenting account for associations between regulatory behaviors and anger.

Authors

• Chang Liu, The Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author

• Ginger A Moore, Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Caroline K.P. Roben, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author

• Leslie D. Leve, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniel S. Shaw, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jody Ganiban, George Washington University
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Reiss, Yale Child Study Center
  Non-Presenting Author

• Misaki N Natsuaki, University of California, Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jenae Neiderhiser, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author