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Children's Emotional Reactions to Stressful Parent-Child Interactions

SUMMARY This paper examines children's physiological reactions to stressful parent-child interactions and tests the notion that vagal tone is a physiological index of the ability to regulate emotion. Basal vagal tone and the suppression of vagal tone at age 4-5 were examined as predictors of mother ratings of child's emotion regulation ability at age 8. Two hypotheses about the mechanism by which vagal tone predicts emotion regulation were examined: a stress inoculation hypothesis and a recovery from arousal hypothesis. Path analyses showed that age 4-5 regulatory physiology predicted child emotion regulation scores at age 8, and that this was partially mediated by the 4- to 5-year-old child's ability to maintain a low heart rate during stressful parent-child interactions. Interrupted time-series analyses of these events as a function of the child's basal vagal tone showed that children with higher basal vagal tone have both a larger heart rate increase to these events as well as faster recovery than children with lower vagal tone.