Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Learning how to self-regulate strong emotions later in life develops from early experiences with your caregiver in distressing situations. Early in life, infants learn how to calm down through coordinating their stress reactivity and regulation behaviours and physiological states with their caregiver. Continued exposure to co-regulation in stressful contexts shapes infants' capacity to regulate their negative affect. Currently, researchers and clinicians lack a basic understanding of how caregiver-infant physiological co-regulation develops over the second year of life. The second year is very important as infant-caregiver distress regulation patterns (i.e. attachment style) becomes reliably demonstrated at this time. The goal of my project is to better understand the development of caregiver-infant cardiological co-regulation (across age and different distress situations) and to determine the relationships between co-regulation and broad infant mental health indicators. The present study will follow caregiver-infant dyads at 12-, 18-, and 24-month vaccination appointments (high distress situation), with an additional lab-based appointment at 24-months. The laboratory visit will involve a mild distress situation (inappropriate puzzle) and a moderate distress situation (separation from caregiver task). The heart rate of the caregiver and infant will be simultaneously recorded at each immunization and lab visit 3-minutes prior and following the distress tasks. Additionally, infants will be tested on a gold standard infant development battery and parents will fill out questionnaires about their and their infant's mental health. The findings from this study are relevant to both researchers and health professionals. My program of research will provide novel and foundational knowledge about the development of physiological co-regulation between toddlers and parents and its role in predicting suboptimal mental health at the end of the second year of life.