Assessing Biobehavioural Self‐Regulation and Coregulation in Early Childhood: The Parent‐Child Challenge Task

Researchers have argued for more dynamic and contextually relevant measures of regulatory processes in interpersonal interactions. In response, we introduce and examine the effectiveness of a new task, the Parent–Child Challenge Task, designed to assess the self‐regulation and coregulation of affect, goal‐directed behaviour, and physiology in parents and their preschoolers in response to an experimental perturbation. Concurrent and predictive validity was examined via relations with children's externalizing behaviours. Mothers used only their words to guide their 3‐year‐old children to complete increasingly difficult puzzles in order to win a prize (N = 96). A challenge condition was initiated midway through the task with a newly introduced time limit. The challenge produced decreases in parental teaching and dyadic behavioural variability and increases in child negative affect and dyadic affective variability, measured by dynamic systems‐based methods. Children rated lower on externalizing showed respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) suppression in response to challenge, whereas those rated higher on externalizing showed RSA augmentation. Additionally, select task changes in affect, behaviour, and physiology predicted teacher‐rated externalizing behaviours four months later. Findings indicate that the Parent–Child Challenge Task was effective in producing regulatory changes and suggest its utility in assessing biobehavioural self‐regulation and coregulation in parents and their preschoolers. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The interaction of distress tolerance and intolerance of uncertainty in the prediction of symptom reduction across CBT for social anxiety disorder

Distress tolerance (DT) and intolerance of uncertainty (IU) have been identified as transdiagnostic processes that predict symptom severity across a range of distinct anxiety disorders. However, the joint effect of these two variables on therapeutic outcome has not yet been examined. It is possible that DT and IU may both impact on treatment response to cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) in clients with anxiety, as clients with weak DT and strong IU may be less likely to engage in exposure and cognitive restructuring tasks across treatment due to their associated distress. The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction of DT and IU as predictors of post-treatment symptom severity and treatment response to group CBT in participants with primary DSM-IV-TR diagnosed social anxiety disorder (SAD). Participants (N = 95) with SAD completed 12 weeks of manualized group CBT. Results of multilevel longitudinal analysis demonstrated an interaction effect, such that lower DT and higher IU predicted higher SAD symptom severity across the course of therapy. The findings are discussed in terms of clinical implications for the disorder-specific and transdiagnostic treatment of anxiety disorders.     

Dismissing-avoidant pattern of attachment and mimicry reactions at different levels of information processing

Individuals with a dismissing-avoidant pattern of attachment are assumed to repress anxiety-related signals, a disposition hypothesized to interfere with facial mimicry and emotional contagion. Further, they are assumed to have one internal working model associated with anxiety, operating out of awareness at early, automatic stages of information processing, and another positive model operating at later, cognitively controlled stages of processing. The main aim of the present investigation was to compare facial mimicry in dismissing-avoidant and non-dismissing subjects at different levels of information processing. Pictures of happy and angry faces were exposed to 61 subjects at three different exposure times (17, 56, and 2,350 ms) in order to elicit facial muscle reactions, first at automatic levels and then at a more controlled levels. Corrugator activity ("frowning muscles") represented negative emotions and zygomaticus activity ("smiling muscles") positive emotions. The dismissing-avoidant subjects scored significantly lower on emotional empathy than the non-dismissing subjects. At the automatic level the dismissing-avoidant subjects showed "normal" corrugator responses (negative emotions) upon exposure to angry faces. At the cognitively controlled level of processing (2,350 ms) a significant interaction effect was shown between Faces x Muscles x Attachment pattern. The dismissing-avoidant subjects showed no corrugator response and an increased zygomaticus response ("smiling reaction") to the angry face, whereas the non-dismissing subjects reacted with a significant mimicking reaction. The dismissing-avoidant subjects' tendency to "smiling" in response to the angry face at the controlled level (2,350 ms) may be interpreted as a repression of their earlier, automatically evoked (56 ms) negative emotional reaction.     

Affect consciousness or mentalization? A comparison of two concepts with regard to affect development and affect regulation

Affect consciousness refers to the ability to adequately perceive, reflect upon and express affect. The concept is used in clinical work with adults, but lacks an equivalent for children's experience of affect. This paper examines the developmental prerequisites for affect consciousness, as well as the concept's applicability to work with children. The main focus is on the development of affect regulation throughout the first 6 years of life. Special emphasis is put on the role of attachment and the unfolding of mentalization ability in this development. The role of play as an organizing factor for affective experience is discussed. Observation of play is highlighted as a strong indicator of affect consciousness in children.     

Trauma and defences: their roots in relationship. An overview

In this paper the differing psychodynamic models of defences are outlined and compared with an attachment theory perspective in which affect regulation plays a central role. Behavioural and intrapsychic distance regulation (defensive exclusion) are seen as the main strategies for affect regulation and are the manifestations of the habitual pattern of emotional regulation in the relationship between the child and the primary caregiver. A new perspective on unconscious fantasy is offered, in which fantasies are seen to be actively created as defensive narratives to protect the development of healthy narcissism and to become integrated into a person's internal working models. Archetypal defences are explored from a developmental perspective and some neurobiological issues relevant to defences are highlighted.     

Mortgaging the future: Dumping ethics with nuclear waste

On August 22, 2005 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued proposed new regulations for radiation releases from the planned permanent U.S. nuclear-waste repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The goal of the new standards is to provide public-health protection for the next million years — even though everyone admits that the radioactive wastes will leak. Regulations now guarantee individual and equal protection against all radiation exposures above the legal limit. Instead E.P.A. recommended different radiation exposure-limits for different time periods. It also recommended using only the arithmetic mean of the dose distribution, to assess regulatory compliance during one time period, but using only the median dose to assess compliance during another period. This piece argues that these two changes — in exposure-limits and in methods of assessing regulatory compliance — have at least four disturbing consequences. The changes would threaten equal protection, ignore the needs of the most vulnerable, allow many fatal exposures, and sanction scientifically flawed dose calculations.     

Preliminary evidence for an emotion dysregulation model of generalized anxiety disorder

Three studies provide preliminary support for an emotion dysregulation model of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). In study 1, students with GAD reported heightened intensity of emotions, poorer understanding of emotions, greater negative reactivity to emotional experience, and less ability to self-soothe after negative emotions than controls. A composite emotion regulation score significantly predicted the presence of GAD, after controlling for worry, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. In study 2, these findings were largely replicated with a clinical sample. In study 3, students with GAD, but not controls, displayed greater increases in self-reported physiological symptoms after listening to emotion-inducing music than after neutral mood induction. Further, GAD participants had more difficulty managing their emotional reactions. Implications for GAD and psychopathology in general are discussed.     

The strategic regulation of children's memory performance and suggestibility

We report two empirical studies that investigated previously reported benefits of a high accuracy motivation, and thus a high threshold, for children's and adults' event recall and for their ability to resist false suggestions. In the studies, 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds, as well as adults, were shown a brief video about an event and were later asked unbiased and misleading questions about it. In Study 1, participants were either (a) given the typical accuracy instructions (including the option to answer with "I don't know"), (b) reminded of the accuracy instructions during the interview, or (c) immediately given feedback and a token for every correct answer. The results showed that the reminders were ineffective in stimulating strategic control behavior in children, independent of age. In Study 2, the confounding effects of feedback and incentives were disentangled by contrasting (a) free report, (b) feedback only, (c) incentives only, and (d) feedback plus incentives. Analyses on recall performance and suggestibility revealed that both feedback and incentives are necessary to increase children's accurate memory reports.     

Domain-specific identity, epistemic regulation, and intellectual ability as predictors of belief-biased reasoning: a dual-process perspective

To explore the hypothesis that domain-specific identity development predicts reasoning biases, adolescents and young adults completed measures of domain-general and domain-specific identity, epistemic regulation, and intellectual ability and evaluated arguments that either supported or threatened their occupational goals. Biases were defined as the use of sophisticated reasoning to reject goal-threatening arguments and the use of cursory reasoning to accept goal-supportive arguments. Across two measures of bias, hierarchical regression analyses showed that domain-specific vocational identity and epistemic regulation best predicted reasoning biases. Neither age nor intellectual ability predicted significant variance in biases after vocational identity and epistemic regulation scores were entered into the regression equations. The results support the thesis that biases in specific domains can be explained both by domain-specific personality attributes and by domain-general metacognitive dispositions to monitor reasoning and decontextualize problem structure from superficial contents. A dual-process framework is proposed to explain the relationships among identity, epistemic regulation, age, intellectual ability, and reasoning biases.     

Family expressiveness and parental emotion coaching: their role in children's emotion regulation and aggression

In this study, we explored the relations between positive and negative family expressiveness, parental emotion coaching, child emotion regulation, and child aggression. The sample included 120 fourth-grade children and their mothers. Mothers completed the Emotion Regulation Checklist, the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire, and a portion of the meta-emotion interview to assess their awareness and acceptance of, and instruction in managing their child's anger and sadness (3 dimensions of parental emotion coaching). Teachers rated each child's aggression and completed the Emotion Regulation Checklist for each child. The 3 dimensions of parental emotion coaching and positive and negative family expressiveness were not directly related to child aggression. However, both negative family expressiveness and the mother's acceptance of the child's negative emotions were indirectly related to child aggression through the child's emotion regulation.