Grant: Doctoral Research Award: CGS-D to Honour Nelson Mandela

Difficulties calming down from distressing events has been linked with physical and mental health problems across all stages of life. The foundation of learning how to calm down begins early in life through an interaction of one's biological dispositions with caregiver soothing style. Despite the importance of the first years of life for setting the base from which negative affect regulation skill is built on, our field lacks a basic understanding of how the ability to regulate distress, both behaviourally and physiologically, develops in the first years of life. The present study will ask parents and infants to participate in a three-step study that involves a laboratory visit after their child's immunization at 12, 18, and 24 months. After each immunization, parents will be asked to participate in a laboratory visit involving both a primarily cognitive distress task (age-inappropriate cognitive task) and primarily emotional distress task (separation task). At the 12- and 24-month laboratory visits, infants will also be tested on a gold standard infant development battery and parents will fill out questionnaires about their infant's temperament. Behavioural recording (videotaping) and heart rate will be simultaneously recorded at each immunization and lab visit 3-minutes prior and following the distress tasks. Our goal is to better understand the development of distress regulation (across age and contexts) and to determine the relationships between distress regulation and broad infant mental health indicators. It is hoped that the findings from this study will help provide guidance on which situations are most able to tell caregivers and health professionals about maladaptive distress regulation and the earliest age in which atypical distress regulation may be predicted. Early detection by caregivers and primary health care professions would facilitate referrals for early prevention and mental health treatment and thus improve mental health for these children.