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，这种儿童状态几乎完全依赖父母的支持来抚慰和调节。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(如生活在贫困家庭资源较少的农村地区的家庭)，可能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。有鉴于此，拟议的项目旨在研究压力和地理隔离等社区变量影响儿童早期心理生理发展的途径。提出以下问题以供分析：(1)对于农村贫困的父母来说，长期暴露在贫困和压力之下，是否会导致生理上应对压力情况的能力下降，皮质醇水平降低和皮质醇对压力的反应迟钝就是明证？(2)照顾者皮质醇反应水平降低是否预示着对孩子的非典型和失调的育儿行为？(3)这些非典型的育儿行为是否会通过暴露孩子正在发育的压力反应系统来影响他们的皮质醇水平？家庭生活项目是实现这一目的的理想数据集。该项目拥有北卡罗来纳州和宾夕法尼亚州农村地区1292个家庭的人口统计、自我报告、行为和生理数据。在儿童6个月和15个月时，主要照顾者和儿童在自由游戏环境、图画书阅读会议以及在儿童的一系列挑战任务期间和之后被观察。所有这些互动的录像带都可以用来编码非典型的母性行为，因为环境编码系统中断了情感交流。此外，还收集了每个时间点的唾液皮质醇样本，并在挑战任务之前和之后为儿童和照顾者进行了化验。非常小的孩子的经历往往局限于家庭内部的互动。社区贫困和压力通过限制营养和卫生资源影响儿童，并影响他们所经历的家庭生活质量。鉴于美国有2000多万儿童生活在贫困中，至关重要的是，我们必须了解这些状况的短期和长期后果，包括贫困在很小的年纪就产生影响的方式。此外，很少或根本没有关于生活在农村贫困条件下的有年幼子女的家庭的研究。考虑到大多数生活在贫困中的儿童都生活在非城市地区，缺乏关于这些家庭的信息尤其令人担忧。这项拟议的研究旨在调查这一独特的、尽管规模可观的美国家庭群体。

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.