The University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA.
Dev Psychobiol. 2021 Jul;63(5):1279-1294. doi: 10.1002/dev.22102. Epub 2021 Feb 15.
Parental input shapes youth self-regulation development, and a lack of sensitive caregiving is a risk factor for youth mental health problems. Parents may shape youth regulation through their influence over biological (including neural) and behavioral development during childhood at both micro (moment-to-moment) and macro (global) levels. Prior studies have shown that micro-level parent-child interactions shape youth's biology contributing to youth mental health. However, it remains unclear whether prior disrupted/absent care affects those moment-to-moment parent-youth interactions in ways that increase risk for youth psychopathology. In the current study, we calculated transfer entropy on cardiac data from parent-youth dyads where the youth had either been exposed to disrupted care prior to adoption or not. Transfer Entropy (TE) tracks information flow between two signals, enhancing quantification of directional coupling, allowing for the examination of parent-child and child-parent influences. Using this novel approach, we identified lower cardiac information transfer from youth-to-parents in dyads where the youth had been exposed to disrupted/absent early care. Moreover we showed that the degree to which the parent's physiology changed in response to youth's physiology was negatively related to the youth's mental health, representing a potential pathway for elevated mental health risk in populations exposed to disrupted/absent early care.
父母的投入塑造了年轻人自我调节的发展，而缺乏敏感的养育是年轻人心理健康问题的一个风险因素。父母可能通过他们在儿童时期对生物（包括神经）和行为发展的影响来塑造年轻人的调节能力，无论是在微观（瞬间到瞬间）还是宏观（全球）层面上。先前的研究表明，微观层面上的亲子互动塑造了年轻人的生物学，从而促进了年轻人的心理健康。然而，目前尚不清楚先前的破坏/缺失的照顾是否会以增加年轻人心理病理学风险的方式影响那些瞬间的亲子互动。在当前的研究中，我们计算了来自经历过领养前破坏/缺失照顾的青年及其父母的心脏数据的传递熵。传递熵 (TE) 跟踪两个信号之间的信息流，增强了对定向耦合的量化，允许检查亲子和子父母的影响。使用这种新方法，我们发现，在经历过破坏/缺失早期照顾的亲子对中，年轻人向父母传递的心脏信息较少。此外，我们还表明，父母的生理反应与孩子的生理反应之间的程度与年轻人的心理健康呈负相关，这代表了暴露于破坏/缺失早期照顾的人群中心理健康风险升高的潜在途径。
