About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 3. Biological Processes: Psychophysiology

Abstract

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Emotion understanding (EU) encompasses a range of capabilities, such as recognizing and labeling emotions and discerning and resonating with others’ feelings. Yet, little is known about subgroups of individuals with varying levels of EU. Resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is a measure of the basal functioning of the parasympathetic nervous system and is an accessible biomarker implicated in emotional development and functioning, such as cognitive empathy (Liew et al., 2010), emotion regulation (Quiñones‐Camacho & Davis, 2018), and more flexible emotional response to social stress (Rahal et al., 2023). Prior research suggests that resting RSA changes across childhood, stabilizing at age 10 (Dollar et al., 2020). This early development may reflect biological adaptation to the changing socioemotional and cognitive demands in one’s life. Hence, the predictive value of resting RSA to emotional outcomes may change across time. Caregiving also plays a central role in shaping how resting RSA relates to mental health (Linde-Krieger et al., 2024). Hence, this study sought to establish EU phenotypes and determine the degree to which predictions from resting RSA to profile membership depends on age and maternal supportive presence.
Mother-child dyads (N=223; 50.2% female sex assigned at birth, 45.7% Latine) participated in a longitudinal study. Resting RSA and maternal supportive presence (observed across caregiver-child interaction tasks) were collected at age 6 (Mage= 73.3 months, SD = 2.45 months). Emotion knowledge (EK; by Kusche Emotion Inventory; Kusche,1984), and affective (AE) and cognitive (CE) empathy (by Griffith Empathy Measure; Dadds et al., 2008) were measured two years later.
Latent profile analysis identified four EU phenotypes: 1) adaptive EU (high EK, low AE, high CE); 2) poor empathy (high EK, high AE, low CE); 3) maladaptive EU (low EK, high AE, low CE; not examined further due to low sample size); and 4) moderate EK (moderate EK, low AE, high CE). Multinomial logistic regression indicated that for younger children (-1SD), lower resting RSA was related to a higher probability of being in the poor empathy profile than the adaptive EU profile, but individuals were more likely to be in the adaptive EU profile than the poor empathy profile as RSA became higher. This effect was not observed in older children. This may suggest that high resting RSA dampens emotion contagion (i.e., AE; Zhang & Wang, 2019) and facilitates higher-order cognitive functioning (e.g., CE; Staton et al., 2009) in younger children. Moreover, as maternal supportive presence increased, higher levels of RSA were associated with a lower probability of being in the adaptive EU profile and a gradually higher probability of being in the moderate EK profile. This may indicate that although caregivers serve as a source of extrinsic emotion regulation for children, when combined with high resting RSA, over-regulation of emotion may occur and obscure normative EK development (DeMartini et al., 2021). The study took a person-centered approach to EU and provided preliminary evidence for the rapid change in the predictive value of resting RSA to EU and the role of caregiving in shaping RSA-EU relationships.

Author information

Author	Role
Caesar Liu, The Pennsylvania State University	Presenting author
Sapir Shenberger, California State University, Northridge	Non-presenting author
Sara R. Berzenski, California State University, Northridge	Non-presenting author
Tuppett Yates, University of California, Riverside	Non-presenting author

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