Deviations in stress and support: Associations with parenting emotions across the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stress is a potent disruptor of parents' emotional well-being and interactions with their children. In the context of the early months of the unfolding pandemic, parents' stress likely fluctuated, with downstream impacts on their parenting experiences. The sample consisted of 72 Latina mothers who participated in a 15-20-min phone interview roughly once a month between March 2020 and January 2021. Mothers were asked about their experiences of stress, the quality of partner support, and their emotional experience of parenting. Analyses revealed that mothers' experiences of stress were high at the beginning of the pandemic and slowly decreased as time went on, though this decline eventually leveled off. Partner support and mothers' emotional experiences of parenting, on the other hand, did not change across the first 10 months of the pandemic. Collectively, the within and between analyses revealed that stress (individually), and stress and support (interactively) were associated with mothers' emotional experiences while interacting with their children. Between-subjects analyses revealed greater stress was associated with greater negative emotions during parenting, though support did not buffer this association. Within-subjects analyses revealed a quadratic association between stress and positive parenting emotions, such that at lower levels of stress, increases in stress were associated with more positive than typical emotions during parenting. However, the inclusion of social support into the model as a moderator revealed that when mothers received less support than typical from their partners, mothers' greater experience of stress was associated with their greater experience of negativity during parent-child interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Assessing unpredictability in caregiver-child relationships: Insights from theoretical and empirical perspectives.

There has been significant interest and progress in understanding the role of caregiver unpredictability on brain maturation, cognitive and socioemotional development, and psychopathology. Theoretical consensus has emerged about the unique influence of unpredictability in shaping children's experience, distinct from other adverse exposures or features of stress exposure. Nonetheless, the field still lacks theoretical and empirical common ground due to difficulties in accurately conceptualizing and measuring unpredictability in the caregiver-child relationship. In this paper, we first provide an overview of the role of unpredictability in theories of caregiving and childhood adversity and present four issues that are currently under-discussed but are crucial to the field. Focusing on how moment-to-moment and day-to-day dynamics are at the heart of caregiver unpredictability, we review three approaches aiming to address some of these nuances: Environmental statistics, entropy, and dynamic systems. Lastly, we conclude with a broad summary and suggest future research directions. Systematic progress in this field can inform interventions and policies aiming to increase stability in the lives of children.

Vagal flexibility to negative emotions moderates the relations between environmental risk and adjustment problems in childhood.

Neurobiological and social-contextual influences shape children's adjustment, yet limited biopsychosocial studies have integrated temporal features when modeling physiological regulation of emotion. This study explored whether a common underlying pattern of non-linear change in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) across emotional scenarios characterized 4-6 year-old children's parasympathetic reactivity (N = 180). Additionally, we tested whether dynamic RSA reactivity was an index of neurobiological susceptibility or a diathesis in the association between socioeconomic status, authoritarian parenting, and the development of externalizing problems (EP) and internalizing problems over two years. There was a shared RSA pattern across all emotions, characterized by more initial RSA suppression and a subsequent return toward baseline, which we call vagal flexibility (VF). VF interacted with parenting to predict EP. More authoritarian parenting predicted increased EP two years later only when VF was low; conversely, when VF was very high, authoritarian mothers reported that their children had fewer EP. Altogether, children's patterns of dynamic RSA change to negative emotions can be characterized by a higher order factor, and the nature by which VF contributes to EP depends on maternal socialization practices, with low VF augmenting and high VF buffering children against the effects of authoritarian parenting.

Latina mothers navigating COVID-19: Within- and between-family stress processes over time.

Objective: This study aimed to understand how periodic shifts in financial cutbacks and fears of contracting COVID-19 contributed to children's externalizing behaviors due to increases in maternal stress among low-income Latina mothers during the first 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread health, economic, and psychological consequences for families and children. The Latino community is particularly vulnerable to the economic and health risks of this pandemic as a consequence of systemic oppression. The family stress model suggests that these family stressors will have psychological repercussions to parents, and downstream behavioral consequences to children. Method: We examined both the within- and between-person impacts of worry surrounding contracting the virus and the economic consequences of the pandemic on maternal stress and child externalizing behaviors. Participants were 73 Latina mothers who completed assessments an average eight times across the first 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. At each assessment time, the mother was asked about worries surrounding contracting the virus, economic cutbacks the family was making, her perceived stress, and her child's externalizing behaviors during a brief phone call. Results: Between-families, higher economic cutbacks indirectly increased child externalizing behaviors through maternal stress. The within-family model revealed that at assessments when mothers expressed greater worry about contracting the COVID-19 virus, they also reported greater stress. Further, at the within-person level, a mother's greater experience of stress was associated with greater reports of child externalizing behaviors, though the indirect association between COVID-19 contract worry and child externalizing behaviors through maternal stress was not significant. Conclusions: Across the first 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the children in Latino families participating in this research exhibited more externalizing behaviors among families that engaged in more financial cutbacks as a function maternal stress. However, periodic spikes in Latina mothers' fears of contracting COVID-19 contributed to periodic spikes in stress, which predicted periodic spikes in child externalizing behaviors. Implications: Greater effort toward social policy that provides economic support for vulnerable families before periods of increased societal stress and greater protections for workers with limited sick leave and schedule flexibility will help promote resilience to future crises among low-income Latino families.

The impact of social disadvantage on autonomic physiology of latinx adolescents: The role of environmental risks.

The experience of poverty embodies complex, multidimensional stressors that may adversely affect physiological and psychological domains of functioning. Compounded by racial/ethnic discrimination, the financial aspect of family poverty typically coincides with additional social and physical environmental risks such as pollution exposure, housing burden, elevated neighborhood unemployment, and lower neighborhood education levels. In this study, we investigated the associations of multidimensional social disadvantage throughout adolescence with autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning at 17 years. Two hundred and twenty nine low-income Mexican-American adolescents (48.6% female) and their parents were assessed annually between the ages of 10 and 16. Participants' census tracts were matched with corresponding annual administrative data of neighborhood housing burden, education, unemployment, drinking water quality, and fine particulate matter. We combined measures of adolescents' electrodermal response and respiratory sinuses arrhythmia at rest and during a social exclusion challenge (Cyberball) to use as ANS indices of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, respectively. Controlling for family income-to-needs, youth exposed to greater cumulative water and air pollution from ages 10-16 displayed altered patterns of autonomic functioning at rest and during the social challenge. Conversely, youth living in areas with higher housing burden displayed healthy patterns of autonomic functioning. Altogether, results suggest that toxin exposure in youths' physical environments disrupts the ANS, representing a plausible mechanism by which pollutants and social disadvantage influence later physical and mental health.

Parasympathetic activity, emotion socialization, and internalizing and externalizing problems in children: Longitudinal associations between and within families.

Biopsychosocial models of children's socioemotional development highlight the joint influences of physiological regulation and parenting practices. Both high and low levels of children's baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) have been associated with children's maladjustment, indicative of nonlinear associations. Negative or unsupportive parental responses to children's emotions are consistently linked with internalizing (IP) and externalizing problems (EP), although few studies have examined how associations vary within families. This study examined within- and between-person associations of children's quadratic baseline RSA, negative maternal emotion socialization, and children's problems over 7 years. RSA was measured in 133 3.5-year-old children (72 female) in predominantly middle- to upper-middle socioeconomic status, Caucasian families. Mothers reported on their emotion socialization practices and their children's adjustment concurrently and 1, 5, and 7 years later. Multilevel structural equation models revealed quadratic associations between baseline RSA and both IP and EP at the between-person level, suggesting that children with moderate RSA had fewer adjustment problems, on average, than children with lower or higher RSA. Across time and between families, children displayed more problems if their mothers reported more negative responses to their children's emotions. Within families, IP were elevated on years when mothers reported higher than usual negative responses, and children with either high or low baseline RSA had more problems on years when mothers reported greater than usual negative responses to their children's emotions. Altogether, these findings suggest that high and low baseline RSA may increase the risk for maladjustment, particularly in the time-varying context of aversive emotion socialization practices. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

We're all in this together: Focus on community attenuates effects of pandemic-related financial hardship on reactance to COVID-19 public health regulations.

There has been resistance to COVID-19 public health restrictions partly due to changes and reductions in work, resulting in financial stress. Psychological reactance theory posits that such restrictions to personal freedoms result in anger, defiance, and motivation to restore freedom. In an online study (N = 301), we manipulated the target of COVID-19 restrictions as impacting self or community. We hypothesized that (a) greater pandemic-related financial stress would predict greater reactance, (b) the self-focused restriction condition would elicit greater reactance than the community-focused restriction condition, (c) reactance would be greatest for financially-stressed individuals in the self-focused condition, and (d) greater reactance would predict lower adherence to social distancing guidelines. Independent of political orientation and sense of community, greater financial stress predicted greater reactance only in the self-focused condition; the community-focused condition attenuated this association. Additionally, greater reactance was associated with lower social distancing behavior. These findings suggest that economic hardship exacerbates negative responses to continued personal freedom loss. Community-focused COVID-19 health messaging may be better received during continued pandemic conditions.

Patterns of poverty across adolescence predict salivary cortisol stress responses in Mexican-origin youths.

Poverty is a chronic stressor associated with disruptions in psychophysiological development during adolescence. This study examined associations of chronic poverty and income changes experienced from pre- to mid-adolescence with hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress responses in late adolescence. Participants (N = 229) were adolescents of Mexican-origin (48.7% female). Household income (converted to income-to-needs ratios) was assessed annually when children were 10-16 years old. At 17 years, adolescents completed Cyberball, a social exclusion simulation task while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Saliva samples were collected prior to and five times over a 50-minute period following the scan, from which salivary cortisol was assayed. Results showed that differential trajectories of poverty from ages 10-16 predicted HPA axis activity at age 17. Relative to others, distinct HPA suppression (hyporeactivity) was demonstrated by youth who started adolescence in deep poverty and were still living in poverty at age 16 despite experiencing some income gains. Youth from more economically secure families evinced typical cortisol increases following the lab stressor. These results suggest that subsequent HPA functioning varies as a function of economic status throughout adolescence, and that efforts to increase family income may promote healthy HPA functioning for youths in the most impoverished circumstances.

The codevelopment of adolescents' and parents' anxiety and depression: Moderating influences of youth gender and psychophysiology.

METHODS: In a 2-year longitudinal study of 220 families, we examined how youth gender and adrenocortical and parasympathetic activity moderated reciprocal, bidirectional relations between parent and youth anxiety and depression problems. RESULTS: Maternal anxiety predicted subsequent youth anxiety and depression. Maternal depression predicted youth anxiety and, for daughters and youth with low adrenocortical reactivity, youth depression. Youth depression predicted maternal depression only for youth with high adrenocortical reactivity. There were no associations between paternal and youth psychopathology. DISCUSSION: Examining youth gender and psychophysiological characteristics that shape the nature of bidirectional influences may inform efforts to identify families at heightened risk for intergenerational transmission of psychopathology.

Family Risk and Externalizing Problems in Chilean Children: Mediation by Harsh Parenting and Emotional Support.

Latent class analysis and multigroup mediation were used with 8,860 families in Chile to identify risk groups varying in socioeconomic status, family structure, and maternal depression, to determine whether profiles differed in children's development of externalizing problems (EP) from 35 to 61 months, and maternal parenting that predicted EP. Four groups were identified: one no-risk profile and three risk profiles, impoverished and undereducated, depressed and impoverished, and father-absent and impoverished. All classes differed in EP. Maternal emotional support and harsh parenting were differentially associated with the development of EP across the three risk groups, relative to the low-risk group. Thus, specific constellations of adversities differentially predicted children's EP and socialization processes mediating links between risk and EP. Implications are discussed.

Longitudinal effects of maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and Reminiscing and Emotion Training on children's diurnal cortisol regulation.

Dysregulation in children's physiological stress systems is a key process linking early adversity to poor health and psychopathology. Thus, interventions that improve children's stress physiology may help prevent deleterious health outcomes. Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) is a brief relational intervention designed to improve maternal caregiving support by enhancing maltreating mothers' capacity to reminisce with their young children. This study evaluated associations between maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and the RET intervention with changes in children's diurnal cortisol regulation across the 1 year following the intervention, and the extent to which improvements in maternal elaborative reminiscing differed between intervention groups and mediated change in children's physiological functioning. Participants were 237 children (aged 36 to 86 months) and their mothers. Results indicated that the RET intervention was associated with significant positive change in elaborative reminiscing, which was sustained over time. Mothers' elaboration immediately after the intervention served as a mediator of RET's effects on improvements in children's diurnal cortisol regulation (steeper diurnal slopes) from baseline to 1 year following intervention. This suggests RET is effective in facilitating physiological regulation among maltreated children.