Change of Heart: Parenting Stress and Distress, and Associations with Heart Rate Variability

Challenging parent-child interactions can be an important source of stress and distress for parents. Family stress models highlight that there is substantial individual variability in adjustment to parenting stressors. The current dissertation sought to examine whether parent self-regulation, as indexed by heart rate variability (HRV), is an inter-individual factor that predicts variability in the association between parenting stressors and parent mood disturbances. The first study tested whether there was an association between parenting stressors and parent’s self-regulatory capacities (i.e., parent HRV), and whether the marital context within which these stressful parent-child interactions occurred moderated this effect. Findings from this study, derived from a sample of 80 cohabiting heterosexual couples with preschool children, suggested that parenting stressors are associated with reduced parent self-regulation capacities and that fathers are especially vulnerable to the marital context within which this occurs. In the second study, using a daily diary design and the same sample as in the first study, we tested whether parent HRV moderated the association between parenting stressors and mood disturbances. Between- and within-person analyses indicated that the strength of the positive association between daily parenting stress and negative mood increased with decreasing HRV, suggesting that depleted parent self-regulatory capacities may index vulnerability to stress-related disturbances in negative mood. In the third and final study, sleep reactivity was identified as a potential pathway through which lower HRV confers greater risk for stress-related mood disturbances. The results from the moderated mediation model with 125 mothers of adolescents with developmental disorders and 97 mothers of typically developing adolescents, suggested that lower HRV is a potential biomarker of increased sleep reactivity which in turn increases the risk for elevated parent depressive symptoms associated with parenting stress. Taken together, these studies suggest that parent self-regulation capacities, as indexed by HRV, is a resource that may help identify which parents adapt, and which parents have difficulty adapting to, parenting stressors

Daily Parenting Stress and Mood Reactivity: The Role of Sleep Quality

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience more stress and depressive symptoms than other parents. These parents are also at risk for sleep disturbances. Given that experimental studies indicate that sleep deprivation impairs emotion regulation, poor sleep may increase the risk for mood disturbances in the context of chronic parenting stress. To better understand the role of sleep quality in the relationship between parenting stress and negative mood, 66 parents of children with ASDs completed self-report measures of daily parenting stress, negative mood, and sleep quality (e.g., sleep efficiency, sleep satisfaction) for six consecutive days. Participants also completed a questionnaire assessing depressive symptoms over the previous two weeks. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that daily negative mood was predicted by between-subject differences in parenting stress, between-subject differences in sleep efficiency, and within-subject differences in sleep satisfaction. Further, sleep quality moderated the impact of parenting stress on mood. Parents who experienced more parenting stress and reported poorer sleep efficiency than other parents experienced more negative mood. Further, parents who experienced more parenting stress reported more negative mood following a night where they had poorer sleep satisfaction than usual, compared to parents exposed to less parenting stress. Sleep satisfaction also fully mediated the relationship between parenting stress and depressive symptoms. Consistent with theories of the emotion regulation function of sleep, sleep disturbances may diminish parents’ ability to cope with the daily challenges of living with a child with ASD, thereby exacerbating the association between daily stress and negative mood. Further, high parenting stress may increase the impact of transient sleep disturbances on mood

From Me to You: Stress Spillover and Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia

Stress spillover describes how stress in one life domain affects other life domains. For example, parenting stress, defined as stress related to raising a child, tends to affect how romantic partners think about, feel, and behave in their romantic relationship with their spouse. Evidence suggests that, on average, parents of young children experience a decline in romantic relationship quality as they transition into parenthood. However, not all parents experience stress spillover from their child-related stress to their romantic relationship. This study evaluated whether respiratory sinus arrhythmia, a biomarker of emotion regulation capabilities in interpersonal relationships, moderates the effect of child-related stress on marital stress among parents of young children. As part of a dyadic study, 82 cohabiting couples raising preschool aged children had their resting RSA assessed during a laboratory visit, and independently reported on their daily child-related stress and marital stress for seven consecutive days. Actor partner interdependence modelling tested the associations between child-related and marital stress for both members of the couple, as well as the moderating role of each partners’ RSA. Results indicated significant actor and partner effects of child-related stress on actor marital stress. These results show that one partner’s reports of child-related stress were related to their own reports of marital stress and to their partner’s reports of marital stress, even after adjusting for their partner’s reports of child-related stress, indicating the presence of a stress spillover effect. Furthermore, a significant interaction between partner’s reports of child-related stress and partner’s RSA when predicting actor’s marital stress revealed that this stress spillover effect was larger among individuals with lower RSA. Our findings suggest that RSA influences the extent to which parenting stress impacts one’s interpersonal behaviours in their romantic relationship

Dyadic Coping, Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia, and Depressive Symptoms Among Parents of Preschool Children

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is a biomarker of cardiac vagal tone that has been linked to social functioning. Recent studies suggest that RSA moderates the impact of interpersonal processes on psychosocial adjustment. The goal of this study was to assess whether RSA would moderate the association between dyadic coping (DC) and depressive symptoms. Eighty cohabiting couples raising preschool children completed the Dyadic Coping Inventory, the Center for Epidemiological Study-Depression scale and had their RSA assessed during a laboratory session. Couples completed follow-up assessments of depressive symptoms 6 and 12 months later. Data were analyzed using an Actor-Partner Interdependence Model. Results indicated that RSA moderated the actor effect of negative DC on depression in men, such that men with lower RSA had a stronger association between their own ratings of negative DC within the couple relationship and their own depressive symptoms, compared to their counterparts with higher RSA. RSA also moderated the partner effect of delegated DC on depressive symptoms. Among men with higher RSA, there was a significant negative association between their partner’s ratings of delegated DC within the couple relationship and the men’s depressive symptoms, whereas partner-rated delegated DC was unrelated to depressive symptoms among men with lower RSA. These results suggest that men with higher RSA may possess social skills and abilities that attenuate the association between stressful marital interactions and negative mood

Vois-tu le kem? Do you see the bos? Foreign word learning at 14-months

How easily can infants regularly exposed to only one language begin to acquire a second one? In three experiments, we tested 14‐month‐old English and French monolingual infants’ ability to learn words presented in foreign language sentence frames. Infants were trained on two novel word‐object pairings and then tested using a preferential looking task. Word forms were phonetically and phonotactically legal in both languages, and cross‐spliced across conditions, so only the sentence frames established the word as native or foreign. In Experiment 1, infants were taught one native and one foreign word and successfully learned both. In Experiment 2 and 3, infants were taught two foreign words, but only showed successful learning of the first word they encountered. These results demonstrate that infants can successfully learn words embedded in foreign language sentences, but this is more challenging than native word learning. More broadly, they show that the sentential context of a novel word, and not just the word form itself, influences infants’ early word learning