Temporal dynamics in infants’ and their parents’ co-regulation processes

Self-regulation is considered to play crucial role in children’s development (Cox, Mills-Koonce, Propper & Gariépy, 2010). Infants already have some elementary behaviors at their disposal to regulate negative emotions such as frustration and fear (Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda & Posner, 2011). These regulatory behaviors include approach and withdrawal, self-soothing, and attentional and communication strategies (Rothbart, Ziaie, O’Boyle, 1992). A powerful way of examining whether regulatory behaviors are adaptive is by examining the temporal association between these behaviors and negative emotions (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004). Only when a regulatory behavior is followed by a reduction in negative emotions, it can be considered an effective down-regulator (i.e., leading to a decrease in distress) and, hence, an adaptive regulatory behavior. However, only a few studies tested these temporal associations. Most support exists for the effectiveness of attentional and soothing behaviors (Planulp & Braungart-Rieker, 2015), but results regarding the effectiveness of other regulatory behaviors are somewhat mixed. For instance, withdrawal seems reasonably effective in some studies (Buss & Goldmsith, 1998), but distress-increasing in other studies (Crockenberg & Leerkes, 2004; Stifter & Braungart, 1995). Moreover, despite the recognition that infants have to rely on external support to regulate their emotions (Sroufe, 2000), almost no studies examine the temporal associations between parental regulatory behaviors and infant negative affect. In fact, in many studies, parents are asked to remain unresponsive (e.g., the Still Face Paradigm). To our knowledge, only one study examined how both parental and infant behaviors precede changes in six month old infant’s fearful emotions, and showed that parents play an important role in emotion regulation (Crockenberg & Leerkes, 2004). In the current study, we observed parent-infant interactions to examine how parents and infants regulate infant’s emotions. We filmed 79 nine to ten month-old infants and one of their parents (85% mothers) during two conditions designed to elicit (mild) frustration: working with a toy that is too difficult for the infant (a challenging condition) and a condition during which the experimenter removed toys the infant was playing with. Infant affect, infant regulatory behaviors, and parental regulatory behaviors are being coded on a second-to-second basis using Noldus Observer (Noldus Co., Wageningen, the Netherlands). Codes for infant regulatory behaviors were adopted from existing schemes and included the above mentioned regulatory behaviors (Braungart-Rieker et al., 1998; Crockenberg & Leerkes, 2004; Ekas et al., 2010). Infant affect is coded on a 7-point scale (Braungart-Rieker et al., 1998) and codes for parental behaviors are adopted from Crockenberg and Leerkes (2004), which fall under the categories of distraction, soothing (e.g., gentle touch, rocking), support (maintaining the infant’s attention), and upregulating behaviors (e.g., behaviors that contain aversive affective quality, or being distracted). Hidden Markov Modelling allows us to examine the dynamic processes through which both parents and infants contribute to the co-regulation process, by identifying a set of latent states that best describe the infant-parent interaction. Through the calculation of transition probabilities, we can examine which combinations of infant and parent behaviors are effective in regulating infant distress (Stifter & Rovine, 2015).