The effects of maternal respiratory sinus arrhythmia and behavioral engagement on mother-child physiological coregulation
Date
2017
Authors
Skoranski, Amanda M., author
Lunkenheimer, Erika, advisor
Lucas-Thompson, Rachel, committee member
Cavalieri, Renzo, committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
Parent-child coregulation, observed as the active organization and coordination of parents' and children's behavioral and physiological states, is an important precursor for children's developing self-regulation, but we know little about how individual parent factors shape parent-child coregulation. We examined whether differences in maternal physiology and behavioral engagement were associated with coregulation of mothers' and their 3-year-old children's physiological states over time. We examined coregulation in real time by modeling maternal and child respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) for 47 families across 18 minutes of dyadic interaction using multilevel coupled autoregressive models fitted in Mplus. Maternal basal RSA, maternal teaching, and maternal behavioral disengagement were each entered as between-subjects predictors to determine the extent to which mother-child coregulation was strengthened or weakened by maternal factors. Whereas greater maternal teaching during the mother-child interaction was associated with stronger coregulation in mother and child RSA over time, maternal disengagement was related to weaker coregulation: specifically, there were more-divergent parent and child RSA at higher levels of maternal disengagement. Coregulation in mother-child RSA was also weakened when mothers' basal RSA was higher. Findings contribute to the emerging knowledge base on real-time patterns of parent-child coregulation and suggest a role for parent-child physiological coregulation as a mechanism by which parent factors support or hinder children's developing self-regulation.