Emotion Coregulation and Coercive Processes in Families of Children with Behavior Disorders: The Role of Parental Self-Regulation

The parent-child relationship is implicated in the etiology and maintenance of early-onset behavior disorders (BDs); yet understanding and effectively targeting the underlying mechanism of treatment necessitates a better understanding of the role of parents’ self-regulatory abilities including executive function (EF) and emotion regulation (ER), which may be especially important for parents of children with ADHD. To address this gap, this study examined the role of parental self-regulation (i.e., EF, ER) on (a) parent-reported negative parenting behaviors and reactivity to child negative emotions in a sample (N = 50) of families seeking services for clinically-significant problem behavior, (b) vocally encoded emotional arousal and coregulation in the context of parent-child interaction and (c) group differences in these relationships for parents of children with disruptive behavior disorder comorbid with ADHD. Findings revealed that emotion dysregulation was associated with negative disciplinary practices but not unsupportive reactions to child negative emotions. Parental EF was not associated with either construct of negative parenting practices. Analysis of interpersonal emotion dynamics indicated that parent EF was associated with greater aggregate child emotional arousal during a clean-up task but emotional coupling and coregulation were not associated with parent-reported ER or EF. Children with ADHD trended toward higher emotional arousal on a clean-up task and parents of children with ADHD coupled their emotional arousal with their child significantly more than parents of children without ADHD, suggesting a pattern of emotion co-dysregulation. Results should be interpreted with caution due to the small sample size and limited initial selection of analyses offered by these novel methods. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed.Doctor of Philosoph

EEG coherence between the verbal-analytical region (T3) and the motor-planning region (Fz) increases under stress in explicit motor learners but not implicit motor learners

This journal supplement contains abstracts of NASPSPA 2010Free Communications - Verbal and Poster: Motor Learning and Controlpublished_or_final_versionThe Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity (NASPSPA 2010), Tucson, AZ., 10-12 June 2010. In Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2010, v. 32 suppl., p. S13