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Parasympathetic regulation has been consistently linked with better emotional functioning in childhood, but it is still not clear if parasympathetic regulation serves as a transcontextual marker of adaptive emotional functioning or if this link is context-specific. This study tested this by examining the specificity of the relation between parasympathetic regulation in distinct types of challenge tasks and different aspects of children's emotional functioning. Emotional functioning included parent-reported emotional reactivity, parent-reported general emotion regulation ability, and child-reported emotion regulation strategy knowledge. One hundred and forty-four 4- to 9-year-olds (M = 6.88 years; SD = 1.80; 52% girls) participated in a cognitive (inhibitory control) and two discrete emotional (disappointing, fear-eliciting) challenges. Resting and reactive indices of respiratory sinus arrhythmia quantified parasympathetic regulation. Emotional reactivity was predicted by parasympathetic regulation during the cognitive challenge, general emotion regulation was predicted by regulation during the fear-eliciting task, and emotion regulation strategy knowledge was predicted by regulation during the disappointment task. Results highlight the importance of considering task context in investigations of how parasympathetic regulation relates to children's functioning., (© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Parenting practices play a major role in socializing children's developing regulatory abilities, but less is known about how parents' regulatory abilities relate to children's healthy functioning. This study examined whether parents' physiological and emotion regulation abilities corresponded to children's physiological and emotional responding to a structured laboratory-based disappointment task. Ninety-seven 3- to 7-year-olds (56 girls; M = 5.79 years) and one parent participated in a multi-method assessment of parents' and children's regulatory functioning. Direct (coaching children to use reappraisal) and indirect (resting physiology, dispositional use of reappraisal) aspects of parents' regulatory abilities were assessed. As expected, an adaptive pattern of parent regulatory abilities composed of higher resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia, use of reappraisal, and coaching reappraisal was associated with children's physiological reactivity after a disappointment indicative of more effective physiological calming in a recovery context (increased parasympathetic activation). In contrast, parents' regulatory abilities did not relate to changes in children's expressions of emotional distress., (© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Children commonly experience negative emotions like sadness and fear, and much recent empirical attention has been devoted to understanding the factors supporting and predicting effective emotion regulation. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a cardiac index of parasympathetic function, has emerged as a key physiological correlate of children's self-regulation. But little is known about how children's use of specific cognitive emotion regulation strategies corresponds to concurrent parasympathetic regulation (i.e., RSA reactivity while watching an emotion-eliciting video). The current study describes an experimental paradigm in which 101 5- and 6-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of three different emotion regulation conditions: Control, Distraction, or Reappraisal. All children watched a sad film and a scary film (order counterbalanced), and children in the Distraction and Reappraisal conditions received instructions to deploy the target strategy to manage sadness/fear while they watched. Consistent with predictions, children assigned to use either emotion regulation strategy showed greater RSA augmentation from baseline than children in the Control condition (all children showed an overall increase in RSA levels from baseline), suggesting enhanced parasympathetic calming when children used distraction or reappraisal to regulate sadness and fear. But this pattern was found only among children who viewed the sad film before the scary film. Among children who viewed the scary film first, reappraisal promoted marginally better parasympathetic regulation of fear (no condition differences emerged for parasympathetic regulation of sadness when the sad film was viewed second). Results are discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of children's emotion regulation and affective physiology., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)