Emotion Regulation and Cortisol in Children with Atopy

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This study will examine how early life experiences, evidenced by exposure to psychosocial risk factors and early childhood illness events, affect 7-year-oid children's emotion regulation in dyadic interactions. Specifically, this study will utilize three different methodologies of assessing emotional regulation: children's physiological stress response (i.e., cortisol), quantified observations of parent-child interactions, and parent report of children's behavior. The study will include a low-income, multi-ethnic, urban population of children (n=158) with multiple episodes of wheezing in infancy. Longitudinal data will allow for examination of the impact of psychosocial risk factors and illness events throughout childhood on later emotion regulation. At a laboratory visit, each child will have a venipuncture, watch humorous movies, and participate in a structured parent-child interaction task. Each child's salivary cortisol will be collected 5 times during the visit. Data will be analyzed to examine (1) relationship among Children's Physiological Stress Response, Dyadic Emotion Regulation, and Parent Perceptions of Children's Emotion Regulation and (2) how psychosocial risk factors and illness events predict Children's Physiological Stress Response and Dyadic Emotion Regulation. Results of the present study will contribute to a better understanding of how early life experiences affect parent-child interactions among children with early childhood illness and inform interventions with the parent-child dyad.