Transgenerational Effects of Poverty and Geographic Isolation on the HPA System

描述（由申请人提供）：养育幼儿经常涉及处理儿童痛苦和情绪失调，这是一种几乎完全依赖父母支持抚慰和调节的儿童状态。生活在贫困中的压力，特别是对于那些地理上与世隔绝的家庭（如生活在农村地区的家庭，贫困家庭可利用或可获得的资源较少）来说，会进一步加剧养育子女的困难，并危及儿童的社会情感发展。鉴于此，拟议的项目旨在研究社区变量（如压力和地理隔离）影响儿童早期心理生理发展的途径。本研究提出以下问题供分析：（1）对于农村贫困的父母，长期暴露于贫困和压力是否会导致生理科普压力情况的能力下降，如皮质醇水平降低和皮质醇对压力的反应迟钝？(2)看护者皮质醇反应性水平的降低是否预示着对儿童非典型和失调的养育行为？(3)这些非典型的养育行为是否会反过来影响儿童的皮质醇水平，使他们发育中的压力反应系统暴露于失调和非抚慰性的养育方式中？家庭生活项目是这方面的理想数据集。这个项目有人口统计学，自我报告，行为和生理数据的1292个家庭在农村北卡罗来纳州和宾夕法尼亚州。在6个月和15个月的儿童年龄，主要照顾者和儿童在自由游戏设置，图画书阅读会议，并在一系列挑战任务的儿童。所有这些互动的录像带都可用于编码非典型的母亲行为，这些行为由来自AMBIANCE编码系统的中断的情感交流索引。此外，在每个时间点收集唾液皮质醇样本，并在激发任务之前和之后对儿童和护理人员进行分析。非常年幼的儿童的经验往往局限于家庭内部的互动。社区贫穷和压力限制了儿童的营养和保健资源，影响了他们的家庭生活质量，从而影响到儿童。鉴于美国有2000多万儿童生活在贫困中，我们必须了解这些条件的短期和长期后果，包括贫困在很小的年龄就产生影响的方式。此外，对生活在农村贫困条件下的有幼儿家庭的研究很少或根本没有。考虑到大多数贫困儿童生活在非都市地区，缺乏关于这些家庭的信息尤其令人不安。这项拟议中的研究将调查这一独特的，虽然相当大的，美国家庭的人口。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Parenting young children frequently involves dealing with child distress and emotional dysregulation, a child state that relies almost entirely on parental support for soothing and regulation. The stresses of living in poverty, especially for those families isolated geographically (such as those living in rural areas with less available or accessible resources for poor families), can further exacerbate the difficulties of parenting and jeopardize the socio-emotional development of children. Given this, the proposed project is designed to examine pathways by which community variables such as stress and geographic isolation manage to impact early psychophysiological development of children. The following questions are proposed for analysis: (1) For parents in rural poverty, does chronic exposure to poverty and stress result in a decreased ability to physiologically cope with stressful situations, as evidenced by lower levels of cortisol and a blunted cortisol response to stress? (2) Do decreased levels of cortisol reactivity in caregivers predict parenting behaviors that are atypical and dysregulating to children? (3) Do these atypical parenting behaviors in turn affect children's cortisol levels by exposing their developing stress responses systems to dysregulating and non- soothing parenting? The Family Life Project is an ideal data set for this purpose. This project has demographic, self-report, behavioral, and physiological data on 1292 families in rural North Carolina and Pennsylvania. At 6 and 15 months of child age, primary caregivers and children are observed in free play settings, picture book reading sessions, and during and following a series of challenge tasks for the child. Videotapes of all of these interactions are available for coding atypical maternal behavior as indexed by disrupted affective communication from the AMBIANCE coding system. In addition, salivary cortisol samples at each time point have been collected and assayed for children and caregivers prior to and following the challenge tasks. Very young children's experiences are often limited to interactions within the household. Community poverty and stress affect children by limiting nutritional and health resources, and by influencing the quality of family life they experience. Given that over 20 million children in the United States are living in poverty, it is critical that we understand both the short and the long term consequences of these conditions, including the ways in which poverty exerts its influences at very young ages. Furthermore, there is little to no research on families with young children who live in conditions of rural poverty. The absence of information on these families is particularly troubling considering that most children living in poverty are in non-metro areas. The proposed study is set to investigate this unique, although sizeable, population of American families.