The Transmission of Emotion Regulation in Traumatized Families

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT This K23 application describes a four-year mentored research and education plan that focuses on examining family processes in the development of children’s emotion regulation within the context of intergenerational interpersonal trauma exposure (victimization that occurs at the hands of another person). The candidate is a trained clinical psychologist with expertise in childhood trauma and PTSD seeking to address gaps in her training that will enable her to implement cutting edge dyadic research that will further the field’s understanding of mechanisms involved in the development of, and protection against, childhood PTSD. Although numerous links have been documented between parental and child posttraumatic stress reactions, the processes that explain these associations are not well understood. Because interpersonal trauma exposure places both children and adults at increased risk for problems with emotion dysregulation, parents’ emotion regulation, as well as their ability to help their children develop effective emotion regulation skills (emotion socialization parenting behaviors, ESPBs), may be two key mechanisms in this transmission. The proposed study aims to elucidate these intrafamilial processes associated with the development of children’s emotion regulation in order to better understand factors that might affect parents’ capacity to help their children overcome the effects of trauma exposure. The candidate will recruit 9-12 year old children who have experienced interpersonal trauma (n=80) and a parent who has also experienced interpersonal trauma. Families will participate in a multi- method assessment of parent and child behavioral and physiological indicators of emotion regulation and parent ESPBs during emotion-eliciting tasks. The study’s specific research aims are: (1) examine the potential mediating role of parents’ ESPBs in the relationship between parent emotion regulation and child emotion regulation; (2) examine within-person relationship and between-person effects among autonomic reactivity and emotion regulation; (3) test the buffering effect of supportive ESPBs; and (4) among a small sub-sample (n=20), examine the longitudinal stability of parents’ emotion regulation and ESPBs, and children’s emotion regulation. The principal training objective for this award is for the candidate to gain expertise in the dyadic biopsychosocial assessment of mechanisms involved in the intergenerational transmission of emotional regulation and dysregulation. Specifically, a rigorous career development plan, comprised of coursework, experiential learning, and mentoring, will address gaps in the candidate’s training in the areas of: (1) observational coding techniques used to evaluate dyadic emotional interactions, (2) physiological indicators of emotional reactivity, and (3) advanced statistical methods relevant to analyzing longitudinal, dyadic data. An experienced mentoring team will lend their expertise and, together with a nurturing institutional environment, will foster the candidate’s attainment of research independence. This mentored training award is integral to the candidate’s development as an investigator working to improve outcomes for traumatized children.