Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA.
Psychophysiology. 2020 Nov;57(11):e13648. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13648. Epub 2020 Jul 27.
Children's self-regulation is a core adaptive system in child development. Physiological indices of regulation, particularly the autonomic nervous system (ANS), have garnered increased attention as an informative level of analysis in regulation research. Cardiography supports the simultaneous examination of both ANS branches via measures of pre-ejection period (PEP) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) as indicators of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, respectively. However, despite their heavily intertwined functions, research examining autonomic coordination across sympathetic and parasympathetic systems is scarce. Moreover, extant efforts have favored static, mean level reactivity analyses, despite the dynamic nature of ANS regulation and the availability of analytic tools that can model these processes across time. This study drew on a sample of 198 six-year-old children from a diverse community sample (49.5% female, 43.9% Latinx) to examine dynamic autonomic coordination using bivariate latent change score modeling to evaluate bidirectional influences of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity over the course of a challenging puzzle completion task. Results indicated that children evidenced reciprocal sympathetic activation (i.e., PEP attenuation and RSA withdrawal) across the challenge task, and these regulatory responses were characterized by a temporally leading influence of PEP on lagging changes in RSA. The current findings contribute to our understanding of children's autonomic coordination while illustrating a novel analytic technique to advance ongoing efforts to understand the etiology and developmental significance of children's physiological self-regulation.
儿童的自我调节是儿童发展的核心适应系统。调节的生理指标，特别是自主神经系统（ANS），作为调节研究的信息分析水平，已经引起了越来越多的关注。心动描记法通过射血前期（PEP）和呼吸窦性心律失常（RSA）的测量来支持对 ANS 两个分支的同时检查，分别作为交感和副交感活动的指标。然而，尽管它们的功能紧密交织，但研究检查交感和副交感系统之间的自主协调的研究很少。此外，尽管自主神经系统调节具有动态性，并且有可以跨时间对这些过程进行建模的分析工具，但现有的研究都倾向于静态的、平均水平的反应性分析。本研究利用来自一个多元化社区样本的 198 名 6 岁儿童的样本（49.5%为女性，43.9%为拉丁裔），使用双变量潜变量变化分数模型来检查动态自主协调，以评估在具有挑战性的拼图完成任务过程中交感和副交感活动的双向影响。结果表明，儿童在整个挑战任务中表现出交感神经的相互激活（即 PEP 衰减和 RSA 撤退），这些调节反应的特点是 PEP 对 RSA 滞后变化的时间领先影响。目前的研究结果有助于我们理解儿童的自主协调，同时展示了一种新的分析技术，以推进理解儿童生理自我调节的病因和发展意义的研究。
