Mother-preschooler RSA synchrony and self-regulation as antecedents of developmental psychopathology in early childhood

Abstract

Background: We examined whether mother-preschooler respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) synchrony and self-regulation, as potential biological antecedents of developmental psychopathology, interacted to shape children's later behavior problems directly and indirectly via harsh parenting.

Methods: Mother-preschooler dyads (N = 135; 53% female) were oversampled for familial risk. Mother-rated harsh parenting and child behavior problems at ages 3 and 4 years were modeled as latent change scores across ages. Age 3 mother-child RSA synchrony was estimated with multilevel modeling as the concurrent effects of maternal RSA on child RSA during a challenging parent-child task. Age 3 child and maternal RSA self-regulation were measured as mean RSA during a resting task.

Results: More positive RSA synchrony with children with stronger individual RSA self-regulation predicted greater decreases in harsh parenting. In contrast, more positive RSA synchrony with children with weaker RSA self-regulation predicted greater increases in harsh parenting. In turn, greater increases in harsh parenting were related to greater increases in children's externalizing problems.

Conclusions: This study illustrates that individual differences in RSA self-regulation influence how parent-child RSA synchrony shapes developmental psychopathology over time and adds to prior research showing that parent-child coregulation patterns may be adaptive or maladaptive depending on the protective or risk-related qualities of the corresponding persons or context.

Keywords: Behavior problems; biomarkers; developmental psychopathology; parenting; parent–child interaction.