Supporting Infant Emotion Regulation Through Attachment-Based Intervention: a Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

Infant emotion regulation has long-term implications for human development, highlighting the need for preventive interventions that support emotion regulation early in life. Such interventions may be especially important for infants higher in emotional reactivity who need to regulate their emotions more frequently and intensely than infants lower in emotional reactivity. The current randomized trial examined main and moderated effects of an attachment-based intervention on (a) infants' use of mother-oriented and self-soothing emotion regulation strategies and (b) infant emotion dysregulation in 186 low-income, predominantly Latino infants. We tested the brief (10-session) Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) intervention in the context of home-based federal Early Head Start (EHS) services. Control participants received home-based EHS plus 10 weekly books. Intent-to-treat analyses with covariates revealed main effects of the intervention on infants' use of mother-oriented emotion regulation strategies during a brief (40-s) novel and potentially fear-inducing procedure (d = 0.31). Infant emotional reactivity moderated intervention impacts on mother-oriented emotion regulation strategies and on infant emotion dysregulation: We found stronger effects of the intervention for infants relatively higher in emotional reactivity. Findings are discussed in terms of the preventive value of attachment-based interventions for supporting early emotion regulation.

Keywords: Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up; Attachment-based intervention; Emotion regulation; Emotional reactivity; Infancy.