Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, 64 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA, 02215, USA.
School of Nursing, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol. 2023 Oct;51(10):1453-1464. doi: 10.1007/s10802-023-01088-3. Epub 2023 Jun 10.
This study explored how patterns of physiological stress reactivity underpin individual differences in sensitivity to early rearing experiences and childhood risk for psychopathology. To examine individual differences in parasympathetic functioning, past research has largely relied on static measures of stress reactivity (i.e., residual and change scores) in infancy which may not adequately capture the dynamic nature of regulation across contexts. Using data from a prospective longitudinal study of 206 children (56% African Americans) and their families, this study addressed these gaps by employing the latent basis growth curve model to characterize the dynamic, non-linear patterns of change in infants' respiratory sinus arrhythmia (i.e., vagal flexibility) across the Face-to-Face Still-Face Paradigm. Furthermore, it investigated whether and how infants' vagal flexibility moderates the links between sensitive parenting, observed during a free play task when children were 6 months of age, and parent-report of children's externalizing problems at 7 years of age. Results of the structural equation models revealed that infants' vagal flexibility moderates the predictive relations between sensitive parenting in infancy and children's later externalizing problems. Simple slope analyses revealed that low vagal flexibility, characterized by less suppression and flatter recovery patterns, exacerbated risk for externalizing psychopathology in the context of insensitive parenting. Children with low vagal flexibility also benefited most from sensitive parenting, as indicated by the lower number of externalizing problems. Findings are interpreted in the light of the biological sensitivity to context model and provide evidence for vagal flexibility as a biomarker of individual's sensitivity to early rearing contexts.
本研究探讨了生理应激反应模式如何为个体对早期养育经历的敏感性以及儿童期精神病理学风险差异提供基础。为了研究副交感神经功能的个体差异，过去的研究主要依赖于婴儿期应激反应的静态测量（即残差和变化分数），而这些分数可能无法充分捕捉到跨情境的调节的动态性质。本研究利用一项前瞻性纵向研究的 206 名儿童（56%为非裔美国人）及其家庭的数据，通过使用潜在基础增长曲线模型来描述婴儿在面对面静止面孔范式中呼吸窦性心律失常（即迷走神经灵活性）的动态、非线性变化模式，从而解决了这些差距。此外，它还调查了婴儿的迷走神经灵活性是否以及如何调节敏感育儿与 6 个月大的自由玩耍任务中观察到的敏感育儿以及 7 岁时父母报告的儿童外化问题之间的联系。结构方程模型的结果表明，婴儿的迷走神经灵活性调节了婴儿期敏感育儿与儿童后期外化问题之间的预测关系。简单斜率分析表明，低迷走神经灵活性（表现为抑制较少和恢复模式较平坦）加剧了不敏感育儿环境中外化精神病理学的风险。迷走神经灵活性较低的儿童也从敏感育儿中受益最多，表现为外化问题的数量较少。研究结果根据生物对环境的敏感性模型进行了解释，并为迷走神经灵活性作为个体对早期养育环境敏感性的生物标志物提供了证据。
