University of California Riverside, Riverside, California.
Brain Behav. 2019 Oct;9(10):e01380. doi: 10.1002/brb3.1380. Epub 2019 Sep 15.
Building on prior evidence that prosocial behavior is related to the regulation of personal distress in difficult situations, and given that physiological regulation is a central contributor to effective emotion regulation, this investigation evaluated whether and how children's autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity during emotion challenges influenced later expressions of prosocial behavior.
The current study utilized a diverse sample of school-aged children (N = 169; 47.9% female; 47.3% Latinx) to evaluate relations between children's parasympathetic (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) and sympathetic (i.e., pre-ejection period; PEP) reactivity in response to each of three film-elicited emotion challenges (i.e., sadness, happiness, and fear) at age 7 and both observed and parent-reported prosocial behavior one year later.
Children's parasympathetic reactivity to a film eliciting sadness evidenced a nonlinear relation with later prosocial sharing such that children who evidenced either RSA withdrawal or augmentation in response to the sad emotion challenge engaged in higher levels of prosocial behavior than children who evidenced relatively low or absent reactivity. Parasympathetic reactivity to films eliciting happiness or fear was not significantly related to later prosocial behavior. Likewise, children's sympathetic reactivity in response to the emotion challenges did not significantly predict later prosocial behavior.
These findings provide preliminary support for a nonlinear association between children's parasympathetic emotion reactivity and later prosocial behavior, and suggest that children's ANS regulation in sad emotion contexts may be particularly important for understanding prosocial development.
基于先前的证据表明亲社会行为与困难情境下个人痛苦的调节有关，并且鉴于生理调节是有效情绪调节的核心贡献者，本研究评估了儿童在情绪挑战期间自主神经系统（ANS）反应是否以及如何影响后来亲社会行为的表达。
本研究利用了一个多样化的学龄儿童样本（N=169；47.9%为女性；47.3%为拉丁裔），以评估儿童在 7 岁时对三种电影引发的情绪挑战（即悲伤、快乐和恐惧）的副交感（即呼吸窦性心律失常；RSA）和交感（即射前期；PEP）反应与一年后观察到的和父母报告的亲社会行为之间的关系。
儿童对引发悲伤的电影的副交感反应与后来的亲社会分享呈非线性关系，即对悲伤情绪挑战表现出 RSA 退缩或增强反应的儿童比表现出相对较低或缺乏反应的儿童表现出更高水平的亲社会行为。对引发快乐或恐惧的电影的副交感反应与后来的亲社会行为没有显著相关。同样，儿童对情绪挑战的交感反应也不能显著预测后来的亲社会行为。
这些发现初步支持了儿童副交感情绪反应与后来亲社会行为之间的非线性关联，并表明儿童在悲伤情绪环境中的自主神经系统调节可能对理解亲社会发展尤为重要。
