Associations of caregiver-child interbrain synchrony and caregiver emotion socialization: a context-dependent perspective

Supportive caregiver emotion-related socialization enhances child emotional, physical, and social outcomes. Emerging data suggest that greater caregiver-child interbrain synchrony is associated with protective developmental outcomes, including increased emotion regulation and decreased psychopathology risk. Utilizing a context-dependent perspective, we investigated concurrent associations between interbrain synchrony in neural regions related to voluntary emotion regulation, caregiver emotion socialization behaviors, caregiver state-level anxiety, and sociodemographic risk across a task with varying emotional contexts. Participants included 342 caregiver-child dyads (Mchildage=5.45 years, SD=1.01 years) at two sites. Dyadic fNIRS hyperscanning data were collected during a dynamic interactive protocol (DB-DOS: BioSynch) with baseline, stressful, and recovery task contexts. Caregivers also completed demographic surveys, the State-Trait Anxiety Questionnaire, and the Coping with Child Negative Emotions Scale. We anticipated that greater sociodemographic risk would be associated with decreased interbrain synchrony via greater caregiver state-level anxiety and non-supportive emotion socialization, particularly in the arousing, emotionally-salient stressful task. Results indicate that, indeed, non-supportive emotion socialization behaviors were linked to decreases in PFC and vlPFC synchrony during stress. Further, in the same model, sociodemographic risk was positively associated with caregiver state-level anxiety, which was in turn positively related to non-supportive emotion socialization. These associations did not jointly emerge in the baseline or recovery contexts. Taken together, task stress and caregiver-reported responses to child distress were associated with caregiver-child interbrain synchrony. In the context of greater risk, caregiver non-supportive responding is linked to decreases in coordination of networks related to voluntary emotion regulation, potentially disrupting processes that facilitate emotion regulation development.