Poster #6 - The Effect of Caregiving Behaviors on Real-time Infant Physiological Regulation

• In Event: Poster Session 02

Abstract

Infant distress vocalizations are important signals that effectively elicit caregiver attention, proximity, and soothing (Bornstein et al., 2017). Over the first year of life, infants begin to strengthen their emotion regulation skills through coordinated, sensitive interactions with their caregiver (Bernard et al., 2013). Caregivers more sensitive to their infant’s distress cues are associated with infants that have stronger social-emotional adjustment (Leerkes et al., 2009). Infants also begin to engage in specific physiological changes that modulate their arousal. Vagal regulation, as indexed by decreases in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in response to a stressor, is theorized to allow for a shift in focus from internal demands to generating coping strategies to control affective arousal (Porges, 2007). It is thought that caregiving behaviors produce reliable changes in infant RSA that in turn support emotion regulation; however, no study to date has examined the effects of specific caregiving behaviors on RSA in real-time.

The aim of this study is to identify the behavioral mechanisms that influence infant RSA during naturalistic episodes of infant distress. In particular, after the onset of infant distress, we will examine the effects of caregiver touch, vocalization, and distraction on infant RSA. We hypothesize that the onset of regulatory behaviors will predict a time-locked decrease in infant RSA, suggesting that regulatory behaviors produce changes in infant RSA that support coping.

Infant-caregiver dyads (n=87) were recruited in the context of a study leveraging wearable sensors to examine mother and infant behaviors in the home in urban United States. Infants were 48% non-Hispanic White and on average 4.5 months old (SD=2.5, Range=0.9-10.8mo). Infants and caregivers wore a Move4 ECG/accelerometer on their chest and were videotaped in their home going through a series of structured and unstructured tasks for approximately 90 minutes.

Episodes of naturalistic infant distress (including fusses and cries) were annotated from video data (ICC=0.85). For each infant, in the context of each distress episode, trained RAs will also annotate caregiver touch, vocalizations, and distraction (i.e., encouraging infant’s attention to a property, object, or event in the environment) that occur after the onset of infant distress and prior to its offset. To obtain infant RSA, we have calculated a dynamic RSA timeseries in MATLAB (Abney et al., 2021). A 15-second sliding window (updated every 200 ms) was used to calculate continuous RSA for analysis.

We will conduct an event-related analysis to examine the effect of each regulatory behavior on infant RSA. Trials will be constructed to include 30 seconds pre- and post- caregiving behavior onset. To evaluate whether any post-event infant RSA changes are significantly different from chance alone, we will conduct bootstrapping to obtain 95% confidence intervals (Abney et al., 2021). Visual inspection of the grand average waveforms relative to 95% CIs will illustrate the effect of regulatory behaviors on time-locked infant RSA. Infant age will be evaluated as a moderator. Results will provide novel insight into the mechanism by which caregiving behaviors support real-time infant regulation.

Authors

• Megan Micheletti, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Anna Madden-Rusnak, University of Texas at Austin

• Kaya de Barbaro, University of Texas at Austin