Nancy L. McElwain - US grants

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to establish and maintain close friendships is central to physical and mental health throughout the life course. The quality of the early child-mother attachment relationship is 1 factor that may forecast friendship competence during the preschool and school years. Little is known, however, about the interpersonal mechanisms through which children's attachment and friend relationships are related. This study aims to assess maternal mental-state talk as a potential mediator of attachment-friend linkages. Through talk about mental states, mothers may foster children's psychological understanding of behavior, which, in turn, has implications for effectively managing interpersonal interactions. Notably, child-mother attachment security and child-friend interactions have each been associated with mental-state talk, yet no single study has brought together these 2 lines of research. Thus, the specific aims of the proposed study are to examine: (a) maternal mental-state talk at 24 months as a function of infant-mother attachment at 15 months, (b) maternal mental-state talk at 24 months as a predictor of children's friendship competence at 36 months, 54 months, kindergarten, and first grade, and (c) maternal mental-state talk as a mediator of longitudinal attachmentfriend associations. In addressing these aims, data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care (SECC) will be utilized. Given the relatively large sample, as well as the multiple and varied assessments of mother-child and child-friend relationships, the NICHD SECC provides a unique opportunity in which to test the proposed mediational model. Videotaped mother-child play sessions at 24 months will be transcribed and coded for maternal mental-state talk. Structural equation modeling will be conducted to assess the validity of the mediational model. Multigroup analyses will assess whether child gender moderates the proposed associations. In addition, several competing models will be tested. By illuminating the interpersonal processes through which children's early attachment relationships are related to their subsequent relationships with friends, researchers and clinicians will be better equipped to design and implement preventive interventions for children at risk for relationship disturbances. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

During the preschool years, most children begin to establish their first friendships. Yet, the quality of young children's friendships varies widely. Why are some children successful in establishing and maintaining positive friendships, whereas others have difficulties with friends? What do children learn in the context of their family relationships that may help them to get along with friends? This research addresses these questions as it examines children's "theory of mind" (i.e., the understanding that individuals have minds and that behavior is a predictable function of mental states, such as intentions, beliefs, desires, and emotions). Having a "theory of mind" is central to the successful navigation of social interactions and relationships. This research suggests that theory of mind may play a key role in understanding family-peer linkages. By construing others' behaviors in terms of mental states, children are better able to interpret other's actions and gauge their own behavior in ways that take the other person's perspective into account. Although some research has highlighted the familial antecedents, and other work has focused on peer outcomes associated with individual differences in children's theory-of-mind understanding, few studies have brought together these two lines of research. This research aims to (a) to assess the extent to which and mechanisms whereby child-mother attachment security at 34 months predicts theory-of-mind understanding from 3 to 5 years, (b) to examine young children's theory-of-mind understanding as a predictor of children's subsequent friendship competence, and (c) to test whether theory-of-mind understanding mediates associations between early child-mother attachment and later friendship outcomes. The research involves a follow-up investigation of 128 children and their families who participated in a short-term longitudinal study of children's social development between 34 and 40 months of age. The follow-up study will take place when the children are 54 and 62 months of age. At each time point, child-friend dyads will be observed during two play sessions in a laboratory playroom, and child interviews will be conducted to assess theory-of-mind understanding. Parents will complete questionnaires on children's social-emotional adjustment, including relationships with peers. To increase confidence in conclusions about mediated effects, several alternative models will be tested. Building on an existing dataset, this follow-up study will provide a longitudinal examination of theory-of-mind understanding across the critical preschool years from ages 3 to 5. Moreover, by illuminating the interpersonal processes through which young children come to understand the mind and in turn the extent to which such understanding fosters children's friendship competence, the current research aims to inform preventive interventions for children at risk for relationship disturbances.

The ability to regulate stress is central to emotional and physical health across the human lifespan. Individual differences in stress regulation are shaped, in part, by the early caregiving environment, particularly parental support during challenge. Little is known, however, about specific features of the parenting response that promote children's regulatory functioning. This interdisciplinary research project will examine prosody, a potentially vital but largely unexamined feature of parental behavior that is defined as the rhythm and intonation of speech and is assessed by investigating the acoustic properties of maternal speech. The investigators will conduct the project by drawing on and integrating theory and evidence from psychology, psychophysiology, linguistics, and speech science. The project will assess the degree to which the acoustic properties of language may elicit parasympathetic activity and, in turn, act as a mechanism by which social experiences "get under the skin" to affect attention and behavior of children during their early years. Project results will enhance knowledge about direct sensory links between parenting and child regulation and will help advance understanding of early socialization processes and child development. Results also will inform key questions in linguistics regarding the biological mechanisms through which communication may operate and, relatedly, may lay groundwork for building models of prosody in spontaneous speech. A more fine-grained understanding of caregiving and its influence on child regulation will be valuable in the design and implementation of prevention and intervention programs for families in high-stress circumstances. This project also will provide valuable educational opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students from multiple disciplines, including training in observational methodology, acoustic analysis, physiological assessments, and advanced data-analytic techniques.

This project will bring together theory and evidence in psychophysiology as well as burgeoning findings from linguistics and speech sciences regarding the acoustic correlates of perceived emotional arousal. The investigators will examine associations between the acoustic properties of maternal speech and children's physiological and behavioral regulation. They will focus on children between 3 and 5 years of age, a developmental period in which regulatory capacities show tremendous growth and caregivers may play a particularly salient role. Mother-child dyads will participate in visits to the laboratory playroom during which time video, audio, and physiological data will be time-synched and recorded continuously during a baseline assessment, a mother-child play session, and two mother-child challenge tasks. Because the stress response unfolds over real time, the investigators will adopt a dynamic analytic approach that permits investigation of the relations between maternal prosody and child regulation across time. Comparisons across interactive tasks will explore whether such processes are more salient under challenge conditions. Because of the pervasiveness of spoken language and the acoustic properties of speech in everyday life, this project will yield information and insights of value for a wide array of disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.

Early family relationships lay the foundation for children's successful development across the lifespan. One particularly important aspect of early family relationships is child-mother attachment security. A child whose attachment-related bids (e.g., clinging, crying) are consistently met with a timely and sensitive response by the caregiver will likely develop a secure attachment to that caregiver, whereas a child whose bids are met with rejection, hostility, or inconsistent responsiveness will likely form an insecure attachment. Variations in early attachment security play a role in 'sculpting' the brain of the developing child. Yet, we know little about the potential neurobiological mechanisms linking child-mother attachment to children's later adjustment. The goals of this research are twofold: (1) to examine how early child-mother attachment security (measured at age 2.5 years) relates to stress-related neural responses at age 13, and (2) test whether stress-related neural responses are associated with adolescent adjustment at age 14.

To carry out this work, participants will be recruited from an existing longitudinal study, the Children's Social Development Project (CSDP), in which child-mother attachment was assessed at 2.5 years. Ten years later, at age 13, mother-adolescent interactions will be observed and adolescents will be interviewed about current attachment relationships. Adolescents' neural responses in two stress-eliciting tasks will be assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). At ages 13 and 14, adolescent adjustment in multiple domains will be assessed via self, maternal, and paternal reports. The proposed study will be the first of its kind to assess how child-mother attachment security in early childhood relates to stress-related neural processes and, in turn, adjustment in adolescence. Project findings have the potential to shed light on fundamental questions regarding how early experiences set the stage for later adjustment and will provide a much needed window into the extent to which typical variation in early human attachment predicts brain functioning in later development.

PROJECT SUMMARY Animal and human studies indicate that extreme forms of early life stress are implicated in structural and functional maladaptation in the brain during the early life course. At the same time, research on developmental psychopathology has indicated that early caregiving and development of insecure or disorganized attachment put children at risk for maladaptive behavioral and emotional problems. Thus, the roots of psychopathology likely take shape during this period of development in the context of transactions between the infant, caregiving environment, and developing brain architecture. Yet, we know little about the potential neurobiological mechanisms linking these transactional processes. Leveraging new methods for assessing infant brain via resting state fMRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), this exploratory/ developmental project aims to explore how integration of neural networks over the first year of life vary as a function of caregiving processes and underlie differences in attachment security/insecurity at the end of the first year. In doing so, we will use longitudinal assessments and multimethod techniques to examine how the quality of infant-mother attachment contributes to intra-network and inter-network connectivity from 3 to 12 months using dynamic whole-brain data-driven approaches. At 3 and 12 months of age, infant scans will be conducted during natural sleep, and resting state functional MRI and DTI will assess changes in functional and structural large-scale network connectivity. At 3, 6, and 9 months, infant-mother interactions will be assessed via (a) an established paradigm that provides age-appropriate assessment of infant attachment-related behavior, and (b) new technology that enables collection of the infant's naturalistic home environment on a large-scale using an automated system that is reliable and valid. At 12 months, infant- mother attachment will be assessed via the gold-standard Strange Situation Procedure. By incorporating multiple levels of analysis across multiple time scales, our project will provide novel insight into transactions among maternal caregiving, infant behavior, and neural networks across the first year of life that underlie infants' attachment-related behavior and representations. Such innovation holds promise for conceptual advances in understanding the role of early caregiving environments in the development of early trajectories of brain and behavior, as well as potential applications for preventive intervention.

The young child?s ability to regulate stress sets the foundation for a host of developmental outcomes, and the parent-infant relationship is the primary context in which stress regulation capacities first develop. Prior research underscores how parents? own stress may lead to disturbances in parent-infant co-regulation of stress. Given the immense disruptions to family life resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical to understand the degree to which COVID-related stress may impact the parent-infant relationship and ultimately infants? neurobehavioral outcomes. We posit here that (a) maternal stress due to the pandemic will be associated with disturbances in the mother-infant relationship, particularly with respect to mother-infant co- regulation of infant distress and (b) mothers? experiences of COVID-related stress will have an indirect effect on infant neurobehavioral outcomes, in part, due to disturbances to the mother-infant relationship. We also aim to investigate risk factors (e.g., maternal depressive symptoms, substance use; infant negative emotionality) that might exacerbate such linkages, as well as protective factors (e.g., maternal social support, coping) that may attenuate them. We will partner with six sites from the NIH HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study- Phase 1 (New York University, Oregon Health Sciences University, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Cincinnati Children?s Hospital, Arkansas Children?s Research Institute) that will permit addressing the proposed aims among a geographically diverse sample of 240 families with infants between 6 and 18 months of age. To assess key constructs relevant to mother-infant relationship disturbance, we will use a novel multimodal sensing platform that captures infant vocalizations, stress physiology, and motor behavior, and we will employ machine learn approaches to these multimodal data to yield automated assessments of mother-infant co-regulation of infant distress. By combining assessments of (a) mothers? COVID-related experiences, as well as maternal, family, and infant functioning, collected by the six HBCD sites via maternal reports and virtual visits and (b) mother-infant co-regulation of stress in home environments using remote multimodal sensing technology, the current study will provide unique opportunities for a nuanced and rich understanding of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on infants born during this unprecedented time.