Physiological and Behavioural Regulatory Processes in Recovering from Distress: Developmental and Contextual Dimensions in Infancy.

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Generally speaking, negative affect regulation is one’s ability to calm down from distressing events. The current program of research focuses on the development of negative affect regulation over the second year of life. Childhood negative affect regulation is important to study because it predicts many different outcomes later in life. The second year of life is an important age because this is the first year infants have reliable strategies to regulate from distress. So, because the second year of life may be when when malleability of regulatory strategies is especially high, this program of research may be especially informative to understanding developmental mechanisms. The program focuses on building a cohort of children and parents (n=600) that will be recruited in paediatrician offices in Toronto and Hamilton. This cohort represents an exciting synergy of two laboratories that have focused their entire programs of research on studying affect regulation. Pillai Riddell (York University) has focused on understanding distress behaviours and Schmidt (McMaster University) has focused on distress physiology (e.g. cardiac). One of the major innovations of this proposed program of research is that the team will be conducting specialized analyses that will discover stable groups of infants based on how they regulate after distressing situations. These groups will be based on both the infant’s behaviours and heart rate physiology. The first study is about describing these stable regulatory groups of infants at three different ages (12-, 18-, 24- months); in three different types of distress situations [distress from immunization needles (high distress), distress from being separated from primary caregiver (moderate distress) and distress from working on a hard puzzle (mild distress)]; and using two types of infant measurement (behaviour and heart physiology)]. The second study examines if we can predict what regulatory groups the infants are in at 24-months by knowing what regulatory groups they were in at other points in the year. Finally, the last study focuses on the important role that caregivers play in shaping an infant’s development of regulation over the second year of life by looking at caregiver factors (e.g. sensitivity, heart rate, psychopathology and parenting stress). One theory that is influential in child development suggests that children who are more reactive and take longer to calm down may be more influenced by caregiver factors than infants who tend to are less reactive.  The findings from all three studies will contribute significantly to our understanding of the development of infant negative affect regulation during a crucial developmental stage. The study cohort will also forms an important foundation for future phases of research that strives to build an integrated behavioural and physiological understanding of negative affect regulation in later childhood.