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). To support the candidate in conducting the proposed research, training is planned in: (a) measurement of changes in respiratory sinus arrhythmia as an index of vagal flexibility, (b) stationary and mobile eye-tracking technologies to capture visual attention to emotional stimuli, (c) health psychology and the collection of blood based health biomarkers, and (d) statistical growth modelling techniques in a structural equation modeling framework. The research environments within the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, will be ideal for the proposed training and research goals, as well as for developing the candidate’s professional skills. Training will occur under the mentorship of renowned experts in each area of training, and will support the candidates career goal of transitioning into an independent research career. 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 health in late life.