Parent-Child Cardiac Convergence During Distress: Longitudinal and Cross-sectional Mechanisms of Early Childhood Regulatory Processes

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Negative affect regulation is one's ability to calm down from distressing events. Understanding the developmental processes subsuming negative affect regulation is important because it predicts many different health outcomes later in life. For example, about 75% of serious mental health disorders relate to challenges with regulating emotions. The second year of life is an important age to study in the developmental pathway of negative affect regulation because this is the first year infants have reliable strategies to regulate from distress. Because the second year of life may be when malleability of regulatory strategies is especially high, this program of research will be especially informative to understanding developmental mechanisms and then creating preventative interventions for children who show early challenges with being able to calm down from highly distressing situations. The current program of research continues a program of research examining how 12-24 month old toddlers calm down after a highly distressing event- vaccination needle. The original program of research (Discovery Grant 2015-2020) successfully followed healthy toddlers through over 400 unique vaccination appointments at 12-, 18-, and 24-months of age. This project examined both behavioural and cardiac patterns in response to a painful and highly distressing stimulus (needle) both within the vaccination appointment and over the course of the year. Having comprehensively described negative affect regulatory patterns, both behaviourally and physiologically,  the renewal program of research strives to take the next leap forward. Our proposed project examines a key factor impacting how a child's negative affect regulation patterns develop during this sensitive period. This renewal grant sets out to investigate the impact of parent-child physiological attunement (i.e. how similar a parent's and child's pattern of regulating from high distress are). In essence, we are interested in studying parent-child attunement in how they react to and regulate from a highly distressing context directly after a painful stimulus; determining whether parent-child attunement predicts toddler negative affect regulation longitudinally; and finally, examining if the mechanisms underlying attunement's impact on toddler negative affect regulation are parent appraisals (i.e. how distressed the toddler is) and their resultant behaviours (i.e. soothing behaviours). We assert this program of research will be highly influential as it marks the first time in the literature, attunement has been studied in a natural context, has been studied longitudinally, and has been studied to discern the mechanisms by which attunement actually impacts toddler negative affect regulation.