Understanding How Child Temperament, Negative Parenting, and Dyadic Parent-Child Behavioral Variability Interact to Influence Externalizing Problems.

To better understand the development of externalizing behavior, the current study examines how multiple levels of influence (child temperament, negative parenting, and dyadic interactions) work together to increase externalizing behaviors over time. Negative parenting (NP) and observed dynamic dyadic behavioral variability (DBV) in parent-child interactions (e.g.

Relations between social attention, expressed positive affect and behavioral inhibition during play.

Flexible social attention, including visually attending to social interaction partners, coupled with positive affect may facilitate adaptive social functioning. However, most research assessing social attention relies on static computer-based paradigms, overlooking the dynamics of social interactions and limiting understanding of individual differences in the deployment of naturalistic attention. The current study used mobile eye-tracking to examine relations between social attention, expressed affect, and behavioral inhibition during naturalistic play in young children.

Mobile Eye Tracking Captures Changes in Attention Over Time During a Naturalistic Threat Paradigm in Behaviorally Inhibited Children.

Attentional biases to and away from threat are considered hallmarks of temperamental Behavioral Inhibition (BI), which is a documented risk factor for social anxiety disorder. However, most research on affective attentional biases has traditionally been constrained to computer screens, where stimuli often lack ecological validity. Moreover, prior research predominantly focuses on momentary presentations of stimuli, rather than examining how attention may change over the course of prolonged exposure to salient people and objects.

Differences in mother-child and father-child RSA synchrony: Moderation by child self-regulation and dyadic affect.

Parents and preschoolers show respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) synchrony, but it is unclear how child self-regulation and the dyadic affective climate shape RSA synchrony and how synchrony differs for mothers and fathers. We examined child average RSA, externalizing problems, and dyadic positive affect as moderators of the synchrony of dynamic, within-epoch child and parent RSA reactivity during a challenging task. Mothers (N = 82) and fathers (N = 60) oversampled for familial risk participated with their 3-year-olds.

The dynamics of maternal scaffolding vary by cumulative risk status.

Parental scaffolding, or parenting behaviors that support children's independence and competence, can foster children's self-regulation development. Children facing higher cumulative risk may experience less scaffolding and more directives from parents, but it is unclear how cumulative risk affects the dynamics of parent-child interactions in real time. We examined the role of cumulative risk in mothers' moment-to-moment use of scaffolding and directives in response to preschoolers' off- and on-task behaviors ( = 117).

The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Child Maltreatment: Parasympathetic Substrates of Interactive Repair in Maltreating and Nonmaltreating Mother-Child Dyads.

Children's repair of conflict with parents may be particularly challenging in maltreating families, and early, stressful parent-child interactions may contribute to children's altered neurobiological regulatory systems. To explore neurobiological signatures of repair processes, we examined whether mother and child individual and dyadic respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) covaried with interactive repair differently in maltreating versus nonmaltreating mother-preschooler dyads ( = 101), accounting for whether repair was mother or child initiated. Mother-initiated repair was equally frequent and protective across groups, associated with no change in mother or child RSA at higher levels of repair.

Mother-Child Coregulation of Parasympathetic Processes Differs by Child Maltreatment Severity and Subtype.

Parasympathetic processes appear to underlie maladaptive parent-child interactions in maltreating families, but it is unknown whether parent-child coregulation of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) differs by child maltreatment severity and subtype. RSA coregulation in maltreating and nonmaltreating mother-child dyads ( N = 146; age 3-5 years) during two dyadic tasks was analyzed using dynamic time series modeling. Nonmaltreating dyads showed positive RSA concordance but maltreating dyads (when examined as one group) did not.

The impact of negative affect on attention patterns to threat across the first 2 years of life.

The current study examined the relations between individual differences in attention to emotion faces and temperamental negative affect across the first 2 years of life. Infant studies have noted a normative pattern of preferential attention to salient cues, particularly angry faces. A parallel literature suggests that elevated attention bias to threat is associated with anxiety, particularly if coupled with temperamental risk.

Maternal anxiety predicts attentional bias towards threat in infancy.

Although cognitive theories of psychopathology suggest that attention bias toward threat plays a role in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety, there is relatively little evidence regarding individual differences in the earliest development of attention bias toward threat. The current study examines attention bias toward threat during its potential first emergence by evaluating the relations between attention bias and known risk factors of anxiety (i.e.