About this session

Thursday, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Examining Adversity and Biomarkers as Predictors of Emotion Regulation Development from Infancy through Emerging Adulthood

Early life adversity places individuals at risk for emotional dysregulation across childhood. Adversity and emotion regulation may be linked through self-regulatory abilities. Specifically, early exposure to adversity may negatively impact children’s developing psychobiological processes, which leads them to be less effective in their capacities for regulating emotional responses, particularly negative emotions. This symposium will examine the ways that different biomarkers of self-regulation (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity, baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia, cortisol, and brain connectivity) and adversity exposures (i.e., neglect, abuse, institutional care, deprivation, threat, low socioeconomic status, neighborhood risk) interact together from infancy through emerging adulthood, and the implications for later socioemotional outcomes (e.g., callous-unemotional traits, aggression). Paper 1 examines associations between neighborhood disadvantage and eight-month-old infants’ changes in respiratory sinus arrhythmia across a social fear-eliciting task. Paper 2 assesses how deprivation and threat in six-month-old infants influences baseline cortisol levels in toddlerhood, in turn predicting callous-unemotional traits in pre-adolescence. Paper 3 looks at how baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia in 5-year-olds and with household socioeconomic status work independently and interactively to predict aggressive behaviors at age 7. Paper 4 focuses on the associations between early life institutional care, abuse, and neglect and emotional perception and brain connectivity in emerging adults aged 18- to 20-years using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Together, these papers demonstrate that early adversity can influence biological functioning and contribute to maladaptive emotion regulation across development and have implications for early identification of at-risk individuals.

Paper #1
Title	Associations Between Neighborhood Risk and Infants’ Moment-to-Moment Parasympathetic Regulation During a Stranger Approach
Presenting author	Anna M. Zhou, Ph.D., Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus; Department of Psychology, University of Denver, United States

Paper #2
Title	Predictive Relations Between Early Adversity, Non-Linear Trajectories of HPA Functioning, and Later Callous-Unemotional Traits
Presenting author	Nicole Huth, Psychological and Brian Sciences, Boston University, United States

Paper #3
Title	At the Heart of Resilience: Baseline RSA, Early Life Adversity, and Middle Childhood Aggressive Behaviors
Presenting author	Jennifer J. Phillips, Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy; Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada

Paper #4
Title	Impacts of Early Adversity on the Neural Basis of Emotion Perception and Regulation
Presenting author	Jennifer A. Silvers, Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Jennifer Julia Phillips, Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada

⇦ Back to schedule