Toddler negative affectivity and effortful control: Relations with parent-toddler conversation engagement and indirect effects on language.

Evidence that early parent-child conversation supports early language development suggests a need to understand factors that account for individual differences in parent-child conversation engagement. Whereas most studies focus on demographic factors, we investigated the role of toddler temperament in a longitudinal study of 120 economically strained families. Specifically, we investigated the degree to which toddlers' negative affectivity and effortful control, considered together as a composite reflecting challenging temperament, accounted for variability in parent-toddler conversation engagement, and whether the frequency of that engagement mediated associations between toddler temperament and toddler expressive language skills. Toddler challenging temperament (i.e., high negative affectivity and low effortful control) and parent-toddler conversation engagement were measured at 18 and 30 months. Toddler expressive language skills were measured at 18, 24, and 36 months. As expected, a path model indicated inverse relations between toddler challenging temperament and concurrent parent-toddler conversation engagement at both 18 and 30 months. Unexpectedly, there were no direct associations between toddler challenging temperament and toddler expressive language skills either concurrently or longitudinally. However, we found indirect effects of toddler challenging temperament on later toddler expressive language skills via parent-toddler conversation engagement. Findings highlight the importance of considering toddler temperamental characteristics in addition to family demographics as important factors that account for variability in parent-toddler conversation engagement.

Investigating the developmental timing of self-regulation in early childhood.

Self-regulation often refers to the executive influence of cognitive resources to alter prepotent responses. The ability to engage cognitive resources as a form of executive process emerges and improves in the preschool-age years while the dominance of prepotent responses, such as emotional reactions, begins to decline from toddlerhood onward. However, little direct empirical evidence addresses the timing of an age-related increase in executive processes and a decrease in age-related prepotent responses over the course of early childhood. To address this gap, we examined children's individual trajectories of change in prepotent responses and executive processes over time. At four age points (24 months, 36 months, 48 months, and 5 years), we observed children (46% female) during a procedure in which mothers were busy with work and told their children they had to wait to open a gift. Prepotent responses included children's interest in and desire for the gift and their anger about the wait. Executive processes included children's use of focused distraction, which is the strategy considered optimal for self-regulation in a waiting task. We examined individual differences in the timing of age-related changes in the proportion of time spent expressing a prepotent response and engaging executive processes using a series of nonlinear (generalized logistic) growth models. As hypothesized, the average proportion of time children expressed prepotent responses decreased with age, and the average proportion of time engaged in executive processes increased with age. Individual differences in the developmental timing of changes in prepotent responses and executive process were correlated r = .35 such that the timing of decrease in proportion of time expressing prepotent responses was coupled with the timing of increase in proportion of time engaging executive processes.

The role of strategy-use and parasympathetic functioning in maternal emotion regulation.

Research has recognized that parental emotion regulation influences whether parents respond sensitively to their children in challenging parenting situations. However, parental emotion regulation is usually assessed using questionnaires that are not about parenting, rather than through examining parents' reaction to specific parenting situations that might evoke negative emotions. This study investigates individual differences in mothers' emotion regulation during parenting, specifically examining the relation between their subjective negative emotions and observed parenting behaviors and whether this relation is moderated by cognitive (strategies to manage negative emotions) and physiological (resting baseline and reactivity of respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) processes. Data of 157 mothers' self-reported negative emotions and strategy-use, their RSA, observed maternal responsiveness, and their preschool-age children's (30-60 months, 49.7% female) challenging behaviors were collected during a Wait Task, in which mothers told children to wait before opening an appealing gift. Regression analysis indicated that, after controlling for how challenging children were, mothers' level of negative emotion was not associated with observed level of maternal responsiveness. In line with hypotheses, the association was moderated by mothers' resting RSA and the extent to which they suppressed negative emotions. However, contrary to hypotheses, the association was not moderated by use of reappraisal, distraction, or rumination, or RSA reactivity. The significant findings suggest that, although mothers' subjective experiences of negative emotions are not necessarily related to less responsive parenting behaviors, the link between maternal emotions and parenting behavior may indicate differences in how mothers engage cognitive strategies as well as their physiological regulation capacity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A dynamic systems account of parental self-regulation processes in the context of challenging child behavior.

To advance the understanding of how parental self-regulation contributes to their role in supporting children's development, this study proposes a model of the dynamic processes involved in parental self-regulation. Based on time-series data from 157 mothers and their 30- to 60-month-old children (49.7% female; 96% White; data collected June 2017-December 2019 in central Pennsylvania, U.S.) during a challenging wait task, the model was tested by examining the temporal relations among challenging child behavior, maternal physiology, and maternal responsiveness. Results were consistent with the hypothesized dynamic negative feedback processes and revealed their associations with the overall quality of parenting behaviors and experiences. Findings elucidate how parents adapt to competing external (attending to child) and internal (restoring parents' equilibrium) demands during parenting challenges.

Father-child physiological concordance on two timescales is differentially associated with paternal characteristics.

Conceptual work on interpersonal physiology suggests that the dynamic concordance between two person's physiological arousal may transpire on multiple timescales, and the timescale on which it unfolds may determine its psychological significance. The current study tested this hypothesis in the context of parent-child interaction by examining whether the concordance in their cardiac arousal on two timescales was differentially associated with parental characteristics. Using data from 98 fathers and their 3- to 5-year-old children during a task designed to frustrate young children, results indicated that the associations between cardiac concordance and fathers' self-reported parenting hassles emerged for the slower timescale (concordant increasing trends in arousal), whereas concordance on the faster timescale (concordant second-by-second reactivity) was associated with fathers' emotional clarity. Findings suggest that there may be multiple layers of concordant patterns in the dynamic associations between fathers' and children's cardiac arousal, which unfold on different timescales and bear different psychological significance.

Toddler negative emotion expression and parent-toddler verbal conversation: Evidence from daylong recordings.

Although early emotional and verbal development are thought to be related, emotional and verbal parent-toddler communication are often studied separately, and are frequently measured during brief, semi-structured tasks. Moreover, there is mixed, indirect evidence as to whether toddler negative emotions may elicit or disrupt parent-toddler verbal communication. To address these gaps, the present study used a wearable audio-recording and processing technology, Language Environment Analysis (LENA; Xu, Yapanel, & Gray, 2009), to sample full-day communication between twenty-five parents and their toddlers (12-23 months). We examined the extent to which toddler vocal negative emotion expressions ("cries"), relative to toddler (pre)-verbal vocalizations or adult speech, initiated, occurred within, or terminated parent-toddler conversation. We found that most (60%) toddler cries were involved in parent-toddler conversation. Toddler cries were unlikely to initiate conversations and, unexpectedly, were unlikely to terminate conversation. Conversations were most often initiated by toddler vocalizations and terminated by adult speech. Findings highlight the importance of measuring both emotional and verbal aspects of parent-toddler communication and the benefit of using sampling techniques that capture communication processes as they unfold in daily life.

Listening in: An Alternative Method for Measuring the Family Emotional Environment.

The family emotional environment influences children's development of emotion regulation in various ways. Children's difficulties with effectively regulating emotions, in turn, can contribute to the development of psychopathology. However, the pathways that explain how environmental emotion-including overheard emotion among family members-influences children's development of healthy or problematic emotion regulation are unclear. In this article, we briefly discuss the most common methods (e.g., questionnaires, laboratory observations) used to assess emotion in the family. We consider the benefits and limitations of these methods and discuss the need for objective measurement of the family emotional environment. We include a description of the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), which provides unobtrusive, extended sampling of the emotional tone of family interaction in the home. We present preliminary evidence of its use with 7- and 8-year-old and their families during one day at home. The method reveals that objectively assessed parent-to-parent interactions that are negatively toned, but not parental self-report of conflict or expressivity, are associated with children's self-reported emotional reactions to hearing independently recorded clips of their mothers' voices during simulated angry interactions. The finding suggests unique contributions of objective, unobtrusive, extended measurement of the family emotional environment to understanding aspects of children's emotional development that may not be captured with other commonly used methods. We discuss future directions that explore how EAR may be used to further our knowledge of the pathways between environmental emotion as a risk factor that influences children's emotional functioning and their psychological well-being.

Describing and Controlling Multivariate Nonlinear Dynamics: A Boolean Network Approach.

We introduce a discrete-time dynamical system method, the Boolean network method, that may be useful for modeling, studying, and controlling nonlinear dynamics in multivariate systems, particularly when binary time-series are available. We introduce the method in three steps: inference of the temporal relations as Boolean functions, extraction of attractors and assignment of desirability based on domain knowledge, and design of network control to direct a psychological system toward a desired attractor. To demonstrate how the Boolean network can describe and prescribe control for emotion regulation dynamics, we applied this method to data from a study of how children use bidding to an adult and/or distraction to regulate their anger during a frustrating task (N = 120, T = 480 seconds). Network control strategies were designed to move the child into attractors where anger is OFF. The sample shows heterogeneous emotion regulation dynamics across children in 22 distinct Boolean networks, and heterogeneous control strategies regarding which behavior to perturb and how to perturb it. The Boolean network method provides a novel method to describe nonlinear dynamics in multivariate psychological systems and is a method with potential to eventually inform the design of interventions that can guide those systems toward desired goals.

Longitudinal changes in young children's strategy use for emotion regulation.

The development of strategies that support autonomous self-regulation of emotion is key for early childhood emotion regulation. Children are thought to transition from predominant reliance on more automatic or interpersonal strategies to reliance on more effortful, autonomous strategies as they develop cognitive skills that can be recruited for self-regulation. However, there are few longitudinal studies documenting age-related changes in different forms and dimensions of strategies. The current study tested predicted age-related changes in strategy use in a task requiring children to wait for something they want. Specifically, we examined the longitudinal trajectories of 3 strategies commonly observed in delayed reward tasks: self-soothing, seeking attention about the demands of waiting (bids), and distracting oneself. We followed a sample of 120 children (54% male, 93.3% white, from semirural and rural economically strained households) from ages 24 months to 5 years who participated in a waiting task each year. Using growth curve modeling, we found declines in self-soothing, rises and then declines in bidding, and increases in distraction from 24 months to 5 years. Next, we investigated whether strategy use trajectories predicted adult ratings of children's emotion regulation during the task, that is, whether children appeared calm and acted appropriately while waiting. Growth in duration and dominance of distraction use predicted judgments that children were well-regulated by age 5 years, whereas growth in dominance of bidding use negatively predicted being rated as well-regulated. We discuss implications for the understanding of strategy development and future directions, including understanding strategy effectiveness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Parental Structuring in Response to Toddler Negative Emotion Predicts Children's Later Use of Distraction as a Self-Regulation Strategy for Waiting.

Structuring is a parental response to young children's behavior that may foster children's attempts to use cognitive skills to engage in self-regulation. Using a rural, economically strained sample, parental structuring in response to 127 eighteen-month-olds' negative emotion was observed during a home visit. Children's distraction, a useful cognitive strategy when waiting for a reward, was assessed during a laboratory wait task at 18, 24, 36, and 48 months. More frequent parental structuring at child age 18 months predicted more developmental growth in children's use of distraction between 18 and 48 months, in contrast with parental directives. Consistent with Kopp's (1989) framework, parental structuring may capitalize on children's cognitive development to play a unique role in fostering children's self-regulation of negative emotion.

Concordance of mother-child respiratory sinus arrythmia is continually moderated by dynamic changes in emotional content of film stimuli.

Evidence suggests that concordance between parent and child physiological states is an important marker of interpersonal interaction. However, studies have focused on individual differences in concordance, and we have limited understanding of how physiological concordance may vary dynamically based on the situational context. We examined whether mother-child physiological concordance was moderated by dynamic changes in emotional content of a film clip they viewed together. Second-by-second estimates of respiratory sinus arrythmia were obtained from mothers and children (N = 158, Mchild age = 45.16 months) as they viewed a chase scene from a children's film. In addition, the film clip's negative emotional content was rated second-by-second. Results showed that mother-child dyads displayed positive physiological concordance only in seconds when there was an increase in the clip's negative emotional content. Thus, dynamic changes in mother-child physiological concordance may indicate dyadic responses to challenge.

Toddler dysregulated fear predicts continued risk for social anxiety symptoms in early adolescence.

Identifying early risk factors for the development of social anxiety symptoms has important translational implications. Accurately identifying which children are at the highest risk is of critical importance, especially if we can identify risk early in development. We examined continued risk for social anxiety symptoms at the transition to adolescence in a community sample of children (n = 112) that had been observed for high fearfulness at age 2 and tracked for social anxiety symptoms from preschool through age 6. In our previous studies, we found that a pattern of dysregulated fear (DF), characterized by high fear in low threat contexts, predicted social anxiety symptoms at ages 3, 4, 5, and 6 years across two samples. In the current study, we re-evaluated these children at 11-13 years of age by using parent and child reports of social anxiety symptoms, parental monitoring, and peer relationship quality. The scores for DF uniquely predicted adolescents' social anxiety symptoms beyond the prediction that was made by more proximal measures of behavioral (e.g., kindergarten social withdrawal) and concurrent environmental risk factors (e.g., parental monitoring, peer relationships). Implications for early detection, prevention, and intervention are discussed.

Toddler emotion expressions and emotional traits: Associations with parent-toddler verbal conversation.

The present study examines how toddler emotions may influence their own or their parents' participation in parent-toddler verbal conversation. Limited, indirect evidence suggests that toddler positive emotions may encourage, whereas negative emotions may disrupt, parent-toddler verbal exchanges, but these hypotheses have not been tested directly. We investigated two aspects of toddler emotions- their emotion expressions and their emotional traits- and examined their relations with parent-toddler verbal conversation engagement. In a sample of families with 18-month-olds (N = 120), we used live, unstructured home observations of toddler emotion expressions and spontaneous parent-toddler verbalizations, and collected parent ratings of toddler temperament. We found that less surgent toddlers who expressed more frequent negative emotion attempted fewer verbalizations. Among all toddlers, those expressing positive emotion received more frequent parent verbal responses, and, unexpectedly, more failed parent attempts to engage their toddler in conversation. Parent-initiated conversation was unrelated to toddler emotion expressions or emotional traits. We discuss how best to integrate the study of early emotional and language development from a transactional perspective.

I know that voice! Mothers' voices influence children's perceptions of emotional intensity.

The ability to interpret others' emotions is a critical skill for children's socioemotional functioning. Although research has emphasized facial emotion expressions, children are also constantly required to interpret vocal emotion expressed at or around them by individuals who are both familiar and unfamiliar to them. The current study examined how speaker familiarity, specific emotions, and the acoustic properties that comprise affective prosody influenced children's interpretations of emotional intensity. Participants were 51 7- and 8-year-olds presented with speech stimuli spoken in happy, angry, sad, and nonemotional prosodies by both each child's mother and another child's mother unfamiliar to the target child. Analyses indicated that children rated their own mothers as more intensely emotional compared with the unfamiliar mothers and that this effect was specific to angry and happy prosodies. Furthermore, the acoustic properties predicted children's emotional intensity ratings in different patterns for each emotion. The results are discussed in terms of the significance of the mother's voice in children's development of emotional understanding.

The role of dynamic, dyadic parent-child processes in parental socialization of emotion.

We investigated what a dyadic framework added to Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad's (1998) parental emotion socialization model based on the argument that the dynamic organization of emotion in the dyad is more than the sum of its parts and thus makes a unique contribution to emotion socialization. Preschoolers (N = 235) completed challenging problem-solving tasks with mothers and fathers, during which parental emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs), child negative emotional arousal, and dyadic positive emotion data were collected. We examined whether dyadic synchrony of positive emotion at age 3 was a mechanism by which age 3 parental ERSBs impacted children's age 5 aggressive behavior in school, accounting for child gender, child negative emotional arousal, and aggressive behavior in preschool. ERSBs were significantly positively related to dyadic positive synchrony with both mothers and fathers at age 3. Longitudinal models supported an indirect effect, not a moderating effect, of dyadic synchrony: both mothers' and fathers' ERSBs contributed to children's less aggressive behavior at age 5 through the effects of higher dyadic positive synchrony. Findings suggest dynamic, dyadic emotional processes should be considered as a mechanism of emotion socialization and that parent-child positive emotional synchrony is supportive of early childhood emotional development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Advancing scientific integrity, transparency, and openness in child development research: Challenges and possible solutions.

Based on the recommendations of a Task Force on Scientific Integrity and Openness it appointed, the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) adopted a Policy on Scientific Integrity and Openness (SRCD, 2019a) and accompanying Author Guidelines on Scientific Integrity and Openness for Publishing in Child Development (SRCD, 2019b). Here we discuss some of the challenges associated with realizing SRCD's vision for a science of child development that is open, transparent, robust, impactful, and conducted with the highest standards of integrity. In identifying the challenges-protecting participants and researchers from harm, respecting diversity, and balancing the benefits of change with the costs -we also offer constructive solutions.

Development of Emotion Regulation Dynamics Across Early Childhood: a Multiple Time-Scale Approach.

Children should become more effective at regulating emotion as they age. Longitudinal evidence of such change, however, is scarce. This study uses a multiple-time scale approach to test the hypothesis that the self-regulation of emotion-the engagement of executive processes to influence the dynamics of prepotent emotional responses-becomes more effective as children move through early childhood. Second-by-second time-series data obtained from behavioral observation of 120 children (46% female) during an 8-min frustration-eliciting wait task completed at four ages (24 months, 36 months, 48 months, 5 years) were modeled using bivariate coupled differential equation models designed to capture age-related changes in the intrinsic dynamics and bidirectional coupling of prepotent and executive processes. Results revealed indirect influences of executive processes on the intrinsic dynamics of children's desire and frustration increased with age but also revealed complex and non-linear age-related changes in how specific aspects of the dynamic interplay between prepotent responses and executive processes influence the effectiveness of regulation at different ages. The findings illustrate the utility of using a dynamics system approach to articulate and study how specific aspects of emotion regulation change with age.

Toward a Unifying Model of Self-Regulation: A Developmental Approach.

The ability to self-regulate is key to healthy, competent functioning. The breadth of evidence supporting the importance of self-regulation is matched by such a diversity of terms, concepts, measures, and levels of analysis that the National Institutes of Health called for progress toward a unifying model. In this article, we review a lineage of conceptual models and suggest a path toward a more unifying model of self-regulation that encompasses both the dynamics of moment-to-moment changes and age-related change. Drawing from these models, we define self-regulation as the influence of the recruitment of executive processes on prepotent responses. We define these terms, locating self-regulation in the dynamic relations between prepotent responses and executive processes, and offer a theoretical-mathematical approach to testing this model.

Progress in understanding the emergence of human emotion.

In the past several decades, research on emotional development has flourished. Scientists have made progress in understanding infants', children's, and adults' abilities to recognize, communicate, and regulate their emotions. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered. We are poised to move from descriptions of aspects of emotional functioning to conceptualizing and studying the developmental mechanisms that underlie those aspects. The gaps in our knowledge provide numerous opportunities for further investigation. With this special issue of Developmental Psychology, we aim to stimulate such progress, especially among colleagues at the beginning of their careers. The articles in this issue are intended to challenge our concepts and take research on emotional development in new directions. Toward this end, this special issue includes empirical studies, theoretical articles, novel conceptualizations, methodological innovations, and invited commentaries from scholars across a range of disciplines. In this introductory essay, we briefly review the history of research on emotional development and provide an overview of the contributions of this special issue with thoughts about the current state of the developmental science and areas in which further advancement on emotional development must be made. These include understanding the nature of emotion itself, identifying the mechanisms that produce developmental changes, examining emotion regulation within differing social contexts, and creating measures of culture that acknowledge globalization, historical change, and within-culture differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).