Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Neurodegenerative Disease: Pathways to Caregiver Health

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PROJECT SUMMARY Neurodegenerative diseases lead to profound cognitive, emotional, and functional impairments that leave individuals dependent upon close relational partners who provide care. Although caregiving is a positive experience for many individuals, providing care for an individual who has socioemotional deficits due to neurodegenerative disease can lead to adverse consequences for spousal caregivers, including poor mental and physical health outcomes. However, little research examines the dyadic, interpersonal pathways through which care recipients’ socioemotional deficits lead to health problems for their caregivers. The current research focuses on interpersonal emotion regulation – the extent to which a caregiver’s negative emotion is downregulated and a caregiver’s positive emotion is upregulated during conflict and an acute stressor with their care recipient – as a potential pathway linking care recipients’ socioemotional deficits to their caregivers’ health problems. The research will compare neurotypicals with individuals who have Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) to understand how these different disease types influence interpersonal emotion regulation (Aim 1). The research will delineate the neural, autonomic, and behavioral correlates of interpersonal emotion regulation (Aim 2), with an emphasis on disease related atrophy, autonomic, and behavioral factors theorized to subserve interpersonal emotion regulation, including vagal flexibility, visual attention to other’s emotional expressions, and empathy. Finally, this research will examine whether poor interpersonal emotion regulation impacts caregiver health longitudinally (Aim 3). The proposed research will provide a more nuanced framework for understanding how socioemotional impairments due to neurodegenerative diseases affect caregivers’ health over time, and advance our understanding of interpersonal emotion regulation and the dyadic processes that promote or hinder healthy aging.