Intersections between cardiac physiology, emotion regulation and interpersonal warmth in preschoolers: Implications for drug abuse prevention from translational neuroscience

Adolescent-onset cannabis use and parenting young children: an investigation of differential effectiveness of a digital parenting intervention

Introduction

There is scant empirical work on associations between current and past cannabis use and parenting skills in parents of young children. As recreational cannabis use is now legal in nearly half of states in the U.S., cannabis use is becoming more ubiquitous.

Methods

In the current study, parents of toddler and pre-school age children were randomly assigned to participate in an app-based parenting skills program that included telehealth coaching (Family Check-Up Online; FCU-O), with a focus on parenting in the context of substance use. We aimed to test associations between adolescent-onset and current cannabis use and parent mental health and parenting skills, as well as whether effects of the FCU-O on parent mental health outcomes varied as a function of past cannabis use. Participants were 356 parents of children ages 1.5-5 participating in a randomized controlled trial of the FCU-O. Parents screened into the study if they reported current or past substance misuse or current depressive symptoms. After completing a baseline assessment, parents were randomly assigned to the FCU-O or control group and completed a follow-up assessment 3 months later. Parents retrospectively reported on the age when they initially used substances, as well as their current use.

Results

After accounting for current cannabis use, adolescent-onset cannabis use was significantly associated with higher symptoms of anxiety and depression, but not with parenting skills. Adolescent-onset cannabis use was found to significantly moderate the effect of the FCU-O on parents' anxiety symptoms. Specifically, the FCU-O was particularly effective in reducing anxiety symptoms for parents with adolescent-onset regular cannabis use, after accounting for current cannabis use.

Discussion

Adolescent-onset regular cannabis use may be a risk factor for later mental health challenges in parents of children under 5. An app-based parenting intervention may be particularly helpful in reducing symptoms of anxiety for parents who used cannabis regularly as adolescents. The findings have significant implications for the prevention of multigenerational risk for substance use and mental health challenges.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of the association between parenting and child autonomic nervous system activity

Parental socialization may influence the development of children's autonomic nervous system (ANS), a key stress-response system. However, to date no quantitative synthesis of the literature linking parenting and child ANS physiology has been conducted. To address this gap, we conducted a pre-registered meta-analysis. A systematic review of the literature identified 103 studies (n = 13,044 participants) with available effect sizes describing the association between parenting and either parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) or sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity in children. The overall analysis revealed non-significant associations between parenting and child ANS physiology on average. However, moderation analyses revealed a positive association between more positive parenting and higher resting PNS activity that was stronger when a study was experimental rather than correlational, and when the sample included children with a clinical condition. In conclusion, well-controlled experimental studies show that positive parenting is associated with the development of higher resting PNS activity, an effect that may be stronger among children who are at elevated developmental risk.

Children's altruism following acute stress: The role of autonomic nervous system activity and social support

Altruistic behavior after stress exposure may have important health and psychological benefits, in addition to broader societal consequences. However, so far experimental research on altruism following acute stress has been limited to adult populations. The current study utilized an experimental design to investigate how altruistic donation behavior among children may be influenced by (a) exposure to an acute social stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test modified for use with children (TSST-M), (b) individual differences in stress physiology, and (c) social support from a parent. The sample consisted of 180 children (54.9% male, 45.1% female; mean age = 9.92 years, SD = 0.56 years) randomly assigned to one of three conditions involving the TSST-M: (a) prepare for the TSST-M alone, (b) prepare for the TSST-M with a parent, and (c) no-stress control group. Results revealed that children made larger donations post-stressor if they were alone before the acute stressor, if they had moderate cardiac autonomic balance, reflecting both parasympathetic and sympathetic influence, and if they were older. Children who prepared for the TSST-M with social support from a parent made comparable donations as children in the no-stress control group, in accord with stress buffering models. Increased altruism following acute stress among children suggests that a comprehensive understanding of the human stress response needs to incorporate "tend-and-befriend" behavior-the tendency for humans to show increased altruistic behavior during times of distress.

Evening chronotype, alcohol use disorder severity, and emotion regulation in college students

The evening chronotype is strongly associated with greater alcohol use, though mechanisms underlying this association are not well understood. The current study evaluated emotion regulation as a potential mechanism linking evening chronotype and alcohol use. Participants were 81 undergraduate students. Chronotype was assessed using the Composite Scale of Morningness (CSM). Alcohol use disorder severity was assessed using the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT). Participants recorded daily sleep patterns using an online diary for seven days. Participants then completed a standardized laboratory emotion regulation task. Self-reported affect, high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), and pre-ejection period (PEP) were measured throughout the task. Sleep duration on non-free days (defined as days when sleep was restricted by morning obligations such as work or school) was evaluated as a moderator. Thirty-one evening chronotypes (CSM scores ≤ 26) were compared to 50 non-evening chronotypes (CSM scores >26). Evening chronotypes reported significantly greater symptoms of alcohol use disorder (F = 4.399, p = .039). In the full sample, emotion regulation was successful for altering affective but not autonomic reactivity to emotional stimuli. There were no chronotype differences in self-reported affect, HF-HRV, or PEP during the emotion regulation task. Longer sleep duration on non-free days was associated with increased HF-HRV during negative emotion regulation among non-evening chronotypes. Moderated mediation revealed that emotion regulation did not mediate the association between evening chronotype and alcohol use, irrespective of sleep duration on non-free days. This study is consistent with the literature on chronotype and substance use, demonstrating that undergraduate evening chronotypes endorse greater severity of alcohol use disorder. Given that emotion regulation did not successfully alter autonomic reactivity to emotional stimuli, emotion regulation as a potential mechanism linking chronotype and alcohol use remains inconclusive. Longer sleep duration appears to be protective for non-evening chronotypes in terms of parasympathetic control during the regulation of negative emotions.

A latent change score approach to understanding dynamic autonomic coordination

Children's self-regulation is a core adaptive system in child development. Physiological indices of regulation, particularly the autonomic nervous system (ANS), have garnered increased attention as an informative level of analysis in regulation research. Cardiography supports the simultaneous examination of both ANS branches via measures of pre-ejection period (PEP) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) as indicators of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, respectively. However, despite their heavily intertwined functions, research examining autonomic coordination across sympathetic and parasympathetic systems is scarce. Moreover, extant efforts have favored static, mean level reactivity analyses, despite the dynamic nature of ANS regulation and the availability of analytic tools that can model these processes across time. This study drew on a sample of 198 six-year-old children from a diverse community sample (49.5% female, 43.9% Latinx) to examine dynamic autonomic coordination using bivariate latent change score modeling to evaluate bidirectional influences of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity over the course of a challenging puzzle completion task. Results indicated that children evidenced reciprocal sympathetic activation (i.e., PEP attenuation and RSA withdrawal) across the challenge task, and these regulatory responses were characterized by a temporally leading influence of PEP on lagging changes in RSA. The current findings contribute to our understanding of children's autonomic coordination while illustrating a novel analytic technique to advance ongoing efforts to understand the etiology and developmental significance of children's physiological self-regulation.

Toward Tailored Interventions: Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Functioning Predicts Responses to an Intervention for Conduct Problems Delivered in Two Formats

Coping Power is an evidence-based preventive intervention for youth with aggressive behavior problems that has traditionally been delivered in small group formats, but because of concerns about potentially diminished effects secondary to aggregation of high-risk youth, an individual format of Coping Power has been developed. The current study examined whether physiological characteristics of the child may provide information about which intervention delivery format works best for that individual. Indicators of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system functioning were examined in 360 fourth-grade children (65% male; 76.4% self-reported African-American) who were randomly assigned to Group Coping Power (GCP) or Individual Coping Power (ICP) (Lochman et al. 2015). Longitudinal assessments of teacher- and parent-reported proactive and reactive aggression were collected through a 1-year follow-up. For children with higher initial levels of aggression, those with lower parasympathetic functioning at pre-intervention showed greater reductions in teacher-rated proactive aggression in the ICP condition than the GCP condition. For children with high parasympathetic functioning, there was no differential effect of intervention format. Regardless of intervention format, youth with lower levels of sympathetic functioning at pre-intervention demonstrated greater reductions in teacher-rated proactive aggression. These findings suggest that physiological indicators may be worth considering in future studies examining which youth respond best to specific types of interventions.

Inhibitory control moderates the quadratic association between resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia and prosocial behaviors in children

Resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is thought to be an important physiological correlate of prosocial behaviors. A negative quadratic association between resting RSA and prosocial behaviors has been found in recent studies. However, it remains unknown whether inhibitory control (IC), as an aspect of cognitive regulation, moderates this quadratic association. This issue was examined in the present study. One hundred and forty-eight children (81 girls, 54.7%) aged 7-8 years completed a go/no-go task to assess their IC, and the children's parents completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire-Chinese version (SDQ-CV) to assess children's prosocial behaviors. Resting RSA was calculated by electrocardiogram (ECG) data collected during a resting period in the laboratory. The results showed a significant quadratic association between resting RSA and children's prosocial behaviors. More importantly, IC had a significant moderating effect on the quadratic association between resting RSA and prosocial behaviors. Specifically, the quadratic effect of resting RSA on prosocial behaviors was observed only among children with low and average IC and disappeared in children with better IC. The findings suggest that IC interacts with resting RSA to contribute to prosocial behaviors in children. High levels of IC could attenuate the negative impact of high and low resting RSA on prosocial behaviors.

Children's physiological reactivity in emotion contexts and prosocial behavior

INTRODUCTION

Building on prior evidence that prosocial behavior is related to the regulation of personal distress in difficult situations, and given that physiological regulation is a central contributor to effective emotion regulation, this investigation evaluated whether and how children's autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity during emotion challenges influenced later expressions of prosocial behavior.

METHODS

The current study utilized a diverse sample of school-aged children (N = 169; 47.9% female; 47.3% Latinx) to evaluate relations between children's parasympathetic (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) and sympathetic (i.e., pre-ejection period; PEP) reactivity in response to each of three film-elicited emotion challenges (i.e., sadness, happiness, and fear) at age 7 and both observed and parent-reported prosocial behavior one year later.

RESULTS

Children's parasympathetic reactivity to a film eliciting sadness evidenced a nonlinear relation with later prosocial sharing such that children who evidenced either RSA withdrawal or augmentation in response to the sad emotion challenge engaged in higher levels of prosocial behavior than children who evidenced relatively low or absent reactivity. Parasympathetic reactivity to films eliciting happiness or fear was not significantly related to later prosocial behavior. Likewise, children's sympathetic reactivity in response to the emotion challenges did not significantly predict later prosocial behavior.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings provide preliminary support for a nonlinear association between children's parasympathetic emotion reactivity and later prosocial behavior, and suggest that children's ANS regulation in sad emotion contexts may be particularly important for understanding prosocial development.

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia and prosociality in childhood: Evidence for a quadratic effect

Research investigating the link between the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) and prosociality in childhood has yielded inconsistent findings. This relation has mainly been conceptualized as linear, however, the broader physiological literature suggests that children's physiological arousal and task performance may be related in an inverted U-shaped fashion-with peak performance at moderate levels of arousal. Therefore, we tested whether resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)-a dispositional indicator of PNS activity-was quadratically related to child- and caregiver-reported sympathy and prosocial behaviors in an ethnically diverse sample of 4- and 8-year-olds (N = 300). We found a quadratic inverted U-shaped association between resting RSA and child-reported sympathy and prosocial behavior in 8-year-olds, whereas no consistent findings emerged for 4-year-olds. Therefore, moderate resting RSA in middle childhood may facilitate sympathy and prosocial behaviors. Dispositional over- or under-arousal of the PNS may impair children's ability to attend and respond to the distress of others by middle childhood.

Early life predictors of callous-unemotional and psychopathic traits

Psychopathy is a disorder that occurs primarily in males. Offenders with psychopathic traits are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in society, particularly violent crime. Early childhood is a time when individual differences in empathy and guilt-key indicators of the construct of psychopathy-are first evident. A growing number of longitudinal studies have begun to investigate how factors in infancy and early childhood predict psychopathic-like traits in later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. These studies have suggested that parenting styles during infancy (parental sensitivity, maternal harsh intrusion, commenting on the emotional state of the child) as well as attachment styles are predictive of later psychopathic-like traits. In addition, child characteristics such as temperament and the functioning of biological systems such as the autonomic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis are predictive. Overall, studies have suggested that at least some of the origins of psychopathic traits are present in infancy and early childhood, which is consistent with the perspective of psychopathy as a neurodevelopmental disorder. A recent evolutionary-developmental model provides hypotheses regarding how psychopathy may develop and why it is more common in males than females. This model, and its implications for intervention, is discussed in the context of the longitudinal studies that have been conducted on psychopathy.

The Translational Value of Psychophysiology Methods and Mechanisms: Multilevel, Dynamic, Personalized

OBJECTIVE

It has been nearly 15 years since Kazdin and Nock published methodological and research recommendations for understanding mechanisms of change in child and adolescent therapy. Their arguments and enthusiasm for research on mechanisms of behavior change (MOBCs) resonated across disciplines and disorders, as it shined a light on the crucial importance of understanding how and for whom treatments instigate behavior change and how therapeutic mechanisms might be extended to "situations and settings of everyday life." Initial efforts focused on how psychotherapy works and linear models, yet the use of theory to guide the study of mechanisms, and laboratory experiments to manipulate them, is broadly applicable.

METHOD

This article considers dynamic physiological processes that support behavior change. Specifically, it examines the utility of psychophysiological methods to measure and promote behavior change. Moreover, it embeds the baroreflex mechanism, a well-defined heart-brain feedback loop, within the theories and strategies of MOBC research.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

Individuals' subjective and expressive experience of change does not always align with their physiological reactivity. Thus, behavior change may be best understood when concurrently assessed across multiple biobehavioral levels. Further, behavior is initiated in the moment, often before conscious deliberation, suggesting that multilevel behavior change research may benefit from real-time methodological designs. Last, substance use trajectories vary widely, suggesting that different MOBCs are more or less active in individuals depending on their personal constituency and the functional need that their substance use serves; thus, methods that are amenable to personalized modeling approaches are important.

Physiological mechanisms of prosociality

Psychophysiological perspectives can provide unique insights into the nature and motivations of children's prosociality and inform our understanding of individual differences. Here, I review current research on prosociality involving some of the most common physiological measures in developmental psychology, including cortisol, various sympathetic nervous system measures, and high-frequency heart rate variability. The literature has been quite mixed, in part because the link between physiology and prosociality is context-dependent and person-dependent. However, recent advances are refining our understanding of the basic physiological mechanisms of prosociality. Resting physiology that contributes to a balance of regulation and vigilance prepares children to effectively cope with future social challenges, like noticing and attending to the needs of others. Experiencing some arousal is an important aspect of empathy-related responding, but physiological patterns of both heightened and hypoarousal can undermine prosociality. Physiological flexibility in response to others' needs may support emotional and behavioral flexibility important for prosociality.

Intergenerational associations in executive function between mothers and children in the context of risk

Executive functioning (EF) is critical for school readiness and other important life skills. Previous investigations have often neglected the important influence of parental EF skills in shaping their own children's EF. This study attempted to replicate recent empirical work that has shown that maternal EF is positively related to child EF. An ecological theoretical framework was used to examine the maternal EF-child EF link in family environments characterized by significant risk and socioeconomic adversity. Data from 38 mother-child dyads revealed that larger maternal working memory capacity was associated with greater child accuracy and slower reaction times on a child-friendly Go/No-Go task of response inhibition but not on an Emotional Go/No-Go task. This finding suggests that in contexts of risk and adversity, slower reaction times, instead of reflecting weaker EF skills, might reflect an adaptive skill-that is, exercising appropriate caution and careful responding on a challenging task. Results provide additional evidence of an intergenerational link between maternal EF and child EF and yield new insights into the nature of EF in adverse environments.

Resting sympathetic arousal moderates the association between parasympathetic reactivity and working memory performance in adults reporting high levels of life stress

The neurovisceral integration model stipulates that autonomic function plays a critical role in the regulation of higher-order cognitive processes, yet most work to date has examined parasympathetic function in isolation from sympathetic function. Furthermore, the majority of work has been conducted on normative samples, which typically demonstrate parasympathetic withdrawal to increase arousal needed to complete cognitive tasks. Little is known about how autonomic regulation supports cognitive function in populations exposed to high levels of stress, which is critical given that chronic stress exposure alters autonomic function. To address this, we sought to characterize how parasympathetic (high-frequency heart rate variability, HF-HRV) and sympathetic (preejection period, PEP) measures of cardiac function contribute to individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity in a sample of high-risk women. HF-HRV and PEP were measured at rest and during a visual change detection measure of WM. Multilevel modeling was used to examine within-person fluctuations in WM performance throughout the task concurrently with HF-HRV and PEP, as well as between-person differences as a function of resting HF-HRV and PEP levels. Results indicate that resting PEP moderated the association between HF-HRV reactivity and WM capacity. Increases in WM capacity across the task were associated with increases in parasympathetic activity, but only among individuals with longer resting PEP (lower sympathetic arousal). Follow-up analyses showed that shorter resting PEP was associated with greater cumulative risk exposure. These results support the autonomic space framework, in that the relationship between behavior and parasympathetic function appears dependent on resting sympathetic activation.

Heart rate variability indices as bio-markers of top-down self-regulatory mechanisms: A meta-analytic review

Theoretical perspectives posit that heart-rate variability (HRV) reflects self-regulatory capacity and therefore can be employed as a bio-marker of top-down self-regulation (the ability to regulate behavioral, cognitive, and emotional processes). However, existing findings of relations between self-regulation and HRV indices are mixed. To clarify the nature of such relations, we conducted a meta-analysis of 123 studies (N=14,347) reporting relations between HRV indices and aspects of top-down self-regulation (e.g., executive functioning, emotion regulation, effortful control). A significant, albeit small, effect was observed (r=0.09) such that greater HRV was related to better top-down self-regulation. Differences in relations were negligible across aspects of self-regulation, self-regulation measurement methods, HRV computational techniques, at-risk compared with healthy samples, and the context of HRV measurement. Stronger relations were observed in older relative to younger samples and in published compared to unpublished studies. These findings generally support the notion that HRV indices can tentatively be employed as bio-markers of top-down self-regulation. Conceptual and theoretical implications, and critical gaps in current knowledge to be addressed by future work, are discussed.