Parent-Child Interaction and Emotion Regulation in Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder

PROJECT SUMMARY Emotion regulation (ER) impairments in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exacerbate social difficulties, increase parental stress, and limit functioning. The preschool years mark a significant period in typical ER development during which parent-child interactions play a critical role. This is also when ASD is typically diagnosed and intervention begins. The research and training described in this K23 application will build on the candidate’s existing expertise, adding conceptual and methodological skills needed to study complex, multi- modal, and dyadic social processes important to ER development. Specifically, this innovative research will examine dynamics of children’s physiological and behavioral responses to distress and parents’ regulatory responses to their children as potential early markers of ER impairment in preschool-age children with and without ASD. Aim 1 tests the hypothesis that children with ASD differ from non-ASD peers in communication of negative emotion and in the degree to which their physiological arousal predicts observed emotion. Aim 2 takes a dyadic view of development to examine how individual differences in child emotion communication relate to parents’ adaptive co-regulatory responses. These aims will be achieved through integration of ambulatory peripheral physiological measurement and detailed microanalytic coding of child emotion communication (e.g. clarity, salience, directedness of emotional signals) and parent response. Machine learning techniques will provide a data-driven approach to integrate multi-modal, dyadic data in examining predictive relationships between physiology and behavior (Aim 1) and between child communication and parent response (Aim 2). Aim 3 will make use of longitudinal measures of child ER to examine how child emotion communication and parental responsiveness relate to later ER. The candidate is a clinical psychologist with expertise in microanalytic coding, bidirectional influences in parent-infant interactions, and early social-communication development in infants at high risk for ASD. The proposed K23 application will provide the candidate with the training needed to develop new knowledge and skills in; (1) collection, analysis, and interpretation of physiological data; (2) machine learning methods for analyzing predictive relations between variables from multiple modalities; and (3) conceptual/theoretical and methodological issues related to ER development in the preschool years. With these new expertise, the candidate will be well-positioned to build an innovative program of research focused on uncovering biobehavioral markers of disrupted social emotional development in children with ASD to act as specific targets for interventions focused on parent-child interactions. Training will occur within the exceptional scientific environment in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and with the support of a team of extremely well-qualified mentors (Drs. Mazefsky, Goodwin, Akcakaya, and Hipwell) and consultants (Drs. Morgan and Lunkenheimer) whose complementary expertise is ideally suited to the goals of this K23 proposal and the candidate’s long-term goals.