Patrick T. Davies - US grants

While interparental relations are known to affect children's functioning directly (i.e., exposure to conflict), and indirectly through parenting, little is known about the specific processes responsible for these pathways. According to a new theory of emotional security, children's emotional security is conceptualized as a primary mediating process of the direct and indirect effects of interparental relations on child adjustment. The current proposal seeks to test the hypotheses derived from the core proposition of this theory. First, marital relations are proposed to play a direct etiological role in the development of child problems by threatening children's sense of emotional security in the interparental subsystem. Second, marital conflict, through its link with parenting disturbances, is proffered to indirectly lead to children's emotional insecurity and thus lay the foundation for their future psychological risk. Third, whereas constructive marital relations (e.g., conflict resolution, intimacy) are hypothesized to foster healthy family contexts and children's security and competency, destructive marital relations (e.g., hostility, child-rearing fights) are thought to have deleterious consequences for family and child functioning. Fourth, characteristics of the wider family context (e.g., parental depression, child temperament) are hypothesized to be salient in shaping parenting and marital disturbances and changing the nature of their impact on child adjustment. One hundred and sixty elementary school children and their parents will participate in a two-wave longitudinal study, with measurement occasions spaced 12 months apart. The tripartite operationalization of emotional security, specifically defined as emotion regulation, representations of family relations, and regulation of exposure to family affect, makes it particularly amenable to empirical testing across multiple family subsystems (e.g., marital, parent-child). All key constructs (i.e., marital relations, parenting, security, child adjustment) will be assessed using multiple methods, agents, and contexts. Adaptive and maladaptive dimensions of family relations and child functioning will be measured to identify a broad set of developmental mechanisms underlying competency, resilience, and risk in the early school years. The longitudinal design and repeated measures of constructs will allow for the delineation of prospective mediator and moderator models as well as the analysis of stability, change, and bidirectionality among family processes.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although interpartner violence increases child vulnerability to mental health problems, little is known about the unfolding mediating mechanisms and the potentiating and protective conditions that help shape the multiplicity of pathways underlying associations between domestic violence and child maladjustment, especially in early childhood. To address these gaps, our broad objective is to identify the pathways involved in the link between domestic violence and young children's adaptation within the framework of the emotional security theory. Our specific aims include: (1) examining whether direct exposure to the interpartner relationship and parenting difficulties mediate the link between interpartner violence and child maladjustment; (2) testing the hypothesis that the mediational role of parenting difficulties and exposure to destructive interpartner relations are further explained by child difficulties in preserving their emotional security in the interpartner and parent-child relationships; (3) charting the developmental interplay between child emotional security, resolution of stage-salient tasks, and mental health; and (4) delineating how family characteristics may alter paths between family processes, child emotional security, and child mental health. Two-hundred and fifty mothers, who have experienced a range of violence in relationships with their partners, and their 2-year-old children will participate in a three-wave longitudinal study, with measurement occasions spaced one year apart. To address earlier methodological limitations in the literature (e.g., monomethod bias; cross-sectional design; focus on a single domain of child functioning), we utilize a multi-method, prospective design that captures multiple levels of child adjustment (e.g., symptoms, competence, neuroendocrine functioning). Our three-wave project is designed to increase the power to test the temporal and conceptual ordering of our variables in mediator and moderator models and to facilitate the charting of the nature and correlates of individual differences in trajectories of child mental health.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children exposed to high levels of interparental conflict are at disproportionately high risk for experiencing a wide array of psychological problems, including internalizing symptoms, externalizing problems, social impairments, and academic difficulties. Consequently, the burden experienced by children from high conflict homes and the resulting psychological, health, and economic costs to U.S. society are extensive. Children's emotional responses to conflict are regarded as pivotal mechanisms in understanding the risk associated with exposure to interparental discord and conflict. Thus, in accordance with the Funding Opportunity Announcement PA-07-083 Basic and Translational Research in Emotion, this study proposes to test a pattern-based reformulation of EST that is rooted in an ethological and evolutionary framework (EST-R; Davies & Sturge-Apple, 2007; Davies & Woitach, 2008). Toward the overarching objective of examining the utility of the novel EST-R framework, this application seeks to address the following specific aims: (1) Identify the nature of the interrelationships among the five profiles, the patterns of subjective reactivity to conflict underlying each profile, and stability and change in the profiles over time; (2) Identify the interparental, family, and child characteristics that serve as correlates and precursors in distinguishing between the different reactivity profiles; (3) Distinguish the common and distinctive neurobiological and neurocognitive underpinnings of children's behavioral profiles of reactivity to conflict; (4) Delineate the mental and physical health trajectories of the EST- R profiles, including testing the incremental power of the specific profiles to predict specific trajectories of children's adjustment after taking into account prevailing measurement approaches; and (5) Contribute to intervention initiatives aimed at addressing children's coping and adaptation to interparental conflict by delineating possible points of intervention associated with particular patterns of children's responding. To accomplish these aims, the project will follow a sample of 250 mothers, fathers, and their four year-old children over three annual measurement occasions. The multi-method, multi-informant, and multi-level measurement battery combined with powerful, sophisticated latent and pattern-based quantitative approaches will generate authoritative tests of the novel, theoretically guided research questions and hypotheses. Consequently, the study has the potential to significantly advance knowledge on family and developmental processes underlying children's trajectories of health and inform prevention and intervention initiatives to alleviate the impact of risky family environments on the development of trauma related psychopathology towards reducing the burden of mental illness in children.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The current application was developed in response to FOA (PA-08-212: "Methodology and Measurement in the Behavioral and Social Sciences") and is designed to further advance measurement and analytic methods for capturing multiple levels of individual adaptation in the family through the collaborative expertise of an interdisciplinary network of scientists from disciplines of Developmental Psychopathology, Cardiology, Communications, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science. Furthermore, as an illustration of the potential utility of these methodological and quantitative advances, we test the viability of our multi-level quantification of psychophysiological reactivity as a potential mechanism that informs pathways between adolescent exposure to family conflict and their psychological adjustment within the broader developmental psychopathology framework. The condensed specific aims of the research application are: (1) develop more feasible and economical wireless systems for validly capturing physiological and behavioral processes underlying emotional reactivity during family interaction tasks, (2) test the psychometric properties of the wireless, ambulatory physiological and paralinguistic measures in relation to the standard assessments of these domains currently used in the literature, (3) investigate the utility for new latent variable growth modeling approaches for modeling functioning in multi-level systems, and (4) guided by predictions from a developmental process model, examine whether multi-system assessments of psychophysiological constructs are developmentally meaningful by examining predictors and sequelae of individual differences in individual components of reactivity in developmental process models. To achieve these aims, the research team will utilize observational paradigms of mothers and preadolescents in interaction with one another with two assessments occurring over the span of one year. The information derived with respect to adolescent emotional reactivity in the context of the family and links to developmental outcomes as well as the methods to be developed in the present application will be of substantial interest to several NIH institutes cutting across different mission priorities and research objectives. In particular, the assessment tools for modeling multiple levels of analysis constructs and associated developmental, physical and mental health outcomes will be of relevance to both NICHD and NIMH. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The methodologies produced from this project will have important public health significance through the derivation of new methods for investigating patterns of regulation of emotional reactivity in adolescents during conflict from multiple levels of analysis. Furthermore, this project will enhance greater understanding of how emotional reactivity in the family informs pathways between adolescent exposure to family conflict and their socio-emotional and stage-salient adjustment.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Coping with peer adversity is a common occurrence in childhood that markedly increases the risk for psychopathology and adjustment problems. However, little is known about the nature, precursors, correlates, and developmental sequelae of individual differences in children's behavioral patterns of responding to peer difficulties. In addressing this knowledge gap, this proposal is designed to apply the ethological reformulation of Emotional Security Theory (EST-R; Davies & Sturge-Apple, 2007) to advance the study of children's social behavior within agonic peer relationships in relation to the goal of maintaining sense of security in peer contexts. As a first test of the utility of the EST-R for the study of per dynamics, this application seeks to address the following specific aims: (1) identify the nature and developmental course (i.e., stability, change) of individual differences in children's adoption of five security profiles of defending against peer threat, (2) explicate interrelationships betwee the security profiles and the proximal characteristics of the peer ecology, and (4) examine hypothesized specificity in the mental health and social adjustment sequelae of the security profiles over the course of one year. To address these objectives, this application proposes to utilize a rich existing data set that followed a high risk sample of over 238 6- to 11-year-old children through two summer camps spaced one year apart. As a supplement to the project, a novel measurement approach will be implemented to rigorously examine children's patterns of behavioral responding to threatening peer events in naturalistic peer settings using an innovative ethologically-based coding scheme. Within the context of careful observations and a broader multi-method, multi-informant design, the sophisticated multi-level structural equation modeling and pattern-based analyses are designed to offer rigorous tests of the novel, theoretically guided hypotheses. Consequently, the study has the potential to significantly advance knowledge on the developmental nature, precursors, and sequelae of discordant peer relationships with direct implications for improving targeted identification of children at risk an guiding studies that identify distinct causal processes and target mechanisms for change in intervention initiatives. .

Given the hierarchical nature of family structure, family systems theory places the interparental relationship as the cornerstone of the family unit (Cox & Paley, 2001). Although disagreements between parents are a regular and normal part of family life, entrenched, chronic, and hostile disputes are proposed to undermine family functioning. To understand how interparental conflict reverberates throughout the family system, process models of interparental discord have focused on identifying how interparental conflict ?spills over? to influence interactions within the parent? child system (Easterbrooks & Emde, 1988). Although a generation of research has been instrumental in cataloguing ?spillover? between the interparental and parent-child subsystems, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. The criticality of process-oriented research in this area is underscored by the high proportion of children who are exposed to interparental hostility and aggression (i.e., National Survey of Children's Health, 2003), with estimates suggesting that between 20% to 40% of parents who live together report significant, clinical levels of distress in their relationships (Cummings & Davies, 2010). Furthermore, experts place emphasis on the clinical value of identifying the etiology of parenting difficulties within high conflict homes (Emery, Fincham, & Cummings, 1992). As a first step toward advancing a process-oriented model of spillover the application addresses the following specific aims: (1) test a cascading family process whereby experiences with hostile interparental conflict increases parenting difficulties by undermining parental self-regulatory abilities; (2) examine whether parental neurobiological reactivity to interparental conflict mediates current and prospective associations among interparental conflict and parenting difficulties; (3) identify how parental explicit and implicit representations of the protective and supportive qualities of their intimate relationship may serve as explanatory processes underlying the spillover of distress from the interparental to parent-child relationship, and (4) consistent with calls underscoring the significance of understanding the relative role of mediational mechanisms in process models, specifically test the distinctiveness of each of the three pathways as mechanisms of spillover. To address these objectives, this application will follow a sample of 250 parents and their 3-4 year-old child over three annual measurement occasions. The multi-method, multi-informant, and multi-level measurement battery combined with powerful latent based quantitative approaches will generate authoritative tests of novel and theoretically guided hypotheses regarding the robustness of multi-level mechanisms underlying spillover from interparental relation dynamics to parenting.

Greater exposure to constructive interparental conflict (IPC) characterized by cooperation, warmth, support, and problem-solving uniquely predicts improvements in children?s mental health outcomes even after considering other family and child characteristics (Jouriles, McDonald, & Kouros, 2016). However, little is known about how, why, and when children directly benefit from witnessing constructive IPC. Although earlier research focused on examining whether decreases in children?s negative emotions and appraisals explain the link between constructive IPC and children?s better psychological adjustment, studies have consistently failed to support this hypothesis. Thus, new scientific calls have been made to examine whether constructive IPC may promote children?s mental health by increasing the salience of their approach or positive valence systems of functioning (Davies, Sturge-Apple, & Martin, 2016). To address this novel paradigm shift, this application is designed to break new ground by providing the first test of a new integrative process model of constructive IPC and its implications for children?s open, flexible, and positive responding to environmental stimuli. Specific aims are centered on examining whether prospective associations between constructive IPC and children?s psychological adjustment (i.e., lower internalizing and externalizing symptoms, social competence, school engagement) are mediated by their: (a) biases in attention to different negative and positive emotional displays; (2) increases in social-cognitive understanding as indexed through emotion knowledge and social problem-solving abilities, and (3) greater emotion regulation (i.e., positive emotionality, effortful control). To further identify which children may profit the most in this supportive environment, another aim is to test the theory-guided hypothesis that children?s physiological reactivity to environmental challenges magnifies associations among constructive IPC and the three classes of mediating mechanisms. Building on the solid base of a strong conceptual framework and promising preliminary findings, this application will test these aims by following a sample of 250 4-year-old children and their parents over three annual measurement occasions. The multi-method, multi-informant, and multi-level measurement battery combined with powerful quantitative analyses will generate authoritative tests of the novel hypotheses. High methodological innovation and rigor is also evident in the use of the latest, sophisticated measures of the proposed mediators (e.g., eye tracking measures of emotion-biased attention; precise computer generated manipulations of emotion stimuli in emotion knowledge assessments) and physiological moderators (e.g., assessment of three stress-sensitive neurobiological systems). Thus, this study has the potential to significantly advance knowledge on mechanisms and conditions by which constructive IPC increases children?s adjustment and inform clinical initiatives designed to maximize the welfare of children and families.

Given the hierarchical nature of family structure, family systems theory places the interparental relationship as the cornerstone of the family unit (Cox & Paley, 2001). Although disagreements between parents are a regular and normal part of family life, entrenched, chronic, and hostile disputes are proposed to undermine family functioning. To understand how interparental conflict reverberates throughout the family system, process models of interparental discord have focused on identifying how interparental conflict ?spills over? to influence interactions within the parent? child system (Easterbrooks & Emde, 1988). Although a generation of research has been instrumental in cataloguing ?spillover? between the interparental and parent-child subsystems, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. The criticality of process-oriented research in this area is underscored by the high proportion of children who are exposed to interparental hostility and aggression (i.e., National Survey of Children's Health, 2003), with estimates suggesting that between 20% to 40% of parents who live together report significant, clinical levels of distress in their relationships (Cummings & Davies, 2010). Furthermore, experts place emphasis on the clinical value of identifying the etiology of parenting difficulties within high conflict homes (Emery, Fincham, & Cummings, 1992). As a first step toward advancing a process-oriented model of spillover the application addresses the following specific aims: (1) test a cascading family process whereby experiences with hostile interparental conflict increases parenting difficulties by undermining parental self-regulatory abilities; (2) examine whether parental neurobiological reactivity to interparental conflict mediates current and prospective associations among interparental conflict and parenting difficulties; (3) identify how parental explicit and implicit representations of the protective and supportive qualities of their intimate relationship may serve as explanatory processes underlying the spillover of distress from the interparental to parent-child relationship, and (4) consistent with calls underscoring the significance of understanding the relative role of mediational mechanisms in process models, specifically test the distinctiveness of each of the three pathways as mechanisms of spillover. To address these objectives, this application will follow a sample of 250 parents and their 3-4 year-old child over three annual measurement occasions. The multi-method, multi-informant, and multi-level measurement battery combined with powerful latent based quantitative approaches will generate authoritative tests of novel and theoretically guided hypotheses regarding the robustness of multi-level mechanisms underlying spillover from interparental relation dynamics to parenting.

The COVID-19 pandemic has historic implications on the health and wellbeing of families and children. Starting in March of 2020, efforts to limit the spread of the virus has created unprecedented challenges and stress to family functioning, including economic declines and job loss, health risks, school closures and disruption to family routines, and increased domestic violence and harsh parenting. Despite evidence indicating that COVID-19 increases rates of interparental hostility and parent-child difficulties, little is known about the lasting effect of COVID-19 on families, particularly how it may modulate the degree and nature of the interdependencies between family relationships or subsystems in ways that modify family functioning. Grounded in the theoretically rich conceptualizations of family systems and spillover processes, this time-sensitive application seeks to explore how the extra-familial perturbations associated with COVID-19 modify associations between interparental hostility and discord and harsh, punitive parenting. This application builds on an existing dataset (Phase 1, N = 235 families) that was collected over a three-year period immediately prior to the onset of the pandemic, and we propose to collect three additional waves of data post-onset of COVID-19. The strength of this application involves the utilization of a quasi-experiment design with the establishment of pre-COVID-baseline for family functioning, and both phases (six waves in total) will utilize multi-method, multi-informant, and multi-level longitudinal design to assess ecological contexts, family dynamics, parent and child characteristics, and parenting behaviors. This study will elucidate how COVID-19 impacts spillover processes and may have enduring effects on family functioning and advance new process-oriented approaches to understanding how COVID-19 modulated spillover processes through mediating mechanism of parental neurobiological and cognitive self-regulation. Furthermore, the present application will identify the preexisting individual or ecological factors as well as COVID-19 related changes in family functioning as risk or protective factors in the spillover processes. The results of this application will have significant implications for understanding the ramifications of COVID-19 on family functioning and have high potential to generate knowledge on targets for evidence-based prevention programs.