Current and Past Research Projects
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Emotional Beginnings ProjectAs children develop they are increasingly asked to
control their behavior. Waiting for food, walking but not running, and
refraining from touching interesting objects, are just a few of the
prohibitions that children face. One particular developmental task is the
tolerance of frustration. Being asked to stop playing and come inside to do a
chore requires the child to inhibit feelings of anger about having to stop an
enjoyable activity. This ability to control one's emotions is often referred
to as emotion regulation. The development of the ability to regulate one's
emotion is believed to be a product of the child's temperament and
environmental influences, specifically parental socialization. However, very
little research has been conducted on the processes and antecedents of
emotion regulation development. One of the primary purposes of the Emotional
Beginnings Project of the Infant and Child Temperament Laboratory is to
investigate how infants and toddlers come to regulate their emotions.
The regulation of emotion may also be influenced
by the child’s physiology.
In this project we examined heart rate activity, specifically vagal
tone, and related it to the child’s behavior during several tasks. Differences in resting vagal tone and
changes in vagal tone to emotional and cognitive challenge may be a marker of
one’s ability to control emotions and behavior. Thus, we may be able to better predict
how well an infant can regulate their emotions and those infants who may need
more external intervention.
The ability to regulate emotions also has
implications for social development. For example, children who do not
tolerate frustration and act out their anger have difficulties in school and
with their peers. Thus, emotional dysregulation may be related to later
behavior problems. Another goal of our project is to examine the relationship
between early emotion regulation ability and later behavior problems. To accomplish our goals we conducted a
longitudinal study that was funded by the National Institutes for Mental
Health. In this study children and their parents were seen several times from
when the child was 2 weeks of age to 2 years of age. We used home visits,
inoculation visits, and laboratory visits to gather our data. In addition,
questionnaires and infant cry diaries were completed by parents. At the inception,
150 families had joined the project and we eagerly followed them through the
infancy period. Because behavior problems do not emerge until the preschool years, The
National Institutes of Mental Health was very interested in having us follow
up on our sample so funded us for another 5 years.. In addition to investigating how early
emotion regulation ability relates to behavior problems in preschool, we also
expanded our investigation to include another measure of the child’s
physiology - sympathetic activation (pre-ejection period), observations of
behavioral control and executive function, and assessment of parenting
behaviors. Toward that end we had
children and their parents return to the laboratory when the children were 4
½ , and 5 ½ for two visits, one with their mothers and one with
their fathers. During the summer
prior to entering first grade our participants returned in groups of 3 or 4
where they interacted with each other and completed a variety of tasks. The final data point was during
the first year of elementary school when we had parents and teachers complete
a number of questionnaires.
We are in the process of coding and
analyzing the data from both phases of the Emotional Beginnings Project. Please check the publications
page periodically to see what we have discovered.
Dr. Stifter is collaborating with Drs. Clancy Blair, Douglas Granger and
Mark Greenberg on a study within a larger project called The Family
Life Project. Below is
a general description of this project.
Our study, Project 1, is concerned
with the characteristics of infants and children growing up in rural
poverty. We are focusing
on the child’s temperament and physiology including heart rate
and cortisol reactivity. One
of the major endeavors we must tackle on this study is the analysis
of the heart rate data and the coding of the behavioral data. Currently, we are training volunteer
undergraduate students to take on these responsibilities. Updates on our activities will be posted
regularly.
The Family Life Project
The
University of North Carolina and Penn State University are collaborating on a large and
exciting five-year study of children’s lives in rural counties. The
Family Life Project team brings together 23 researchers with expertise in
education, medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography and human
development. Existing research provides important
information about families and children living in large, urban environments,
but relatively little knowledge about how families and children are
influenced by living in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas. The Family Life Project’s primary
goal is to develop a better understanding of how growing up in such areas
might influence the development of young children in the birth to three year
age range. In particular, we are interested in learning about how differences
in children’s development are linked to variations in temperament,
family experience, community structure, economic circumstances, and
ethnicity. The Family Life Project is organized into
two parts. The first part involves an in-depth appraisal of community
characteristics that affect families and children’s lives. We also
conduct intensive interviews and observations with 72 families distributed
equally across Wayne, Wilson, and Sampson counties in In the second part of the project, 700
families with newborns living in the three NC counties and 500 families
living in the three PA counties participate in a series of home visits,
childcare visits, and phone calls throughout the first three years of their
babies’ lives. During these home visits, the families will be
interviewed, observed in their homes, and asked to engage in activities such
as playing and reading with their children at five different time points:
when children are 2, 6, 15, 24, and 36 months of age. Childcare visits
include observing the child in his or her caregiving setting. Regular contact
will also be made by phone to document important changes in family life.
Early Infancy ProjectInfant colic has been an enigma for parents,
pediatricians and psychologists. Popularly defined as paroxysmal crying that
lasts for a total of 3 or more hours per day/3 or more days per week colic
has been poorly studied. Recently, however, researchers from the medical,
psychological and nutrition fields have turned their attention to this
intense but temporary condition and we were pleased to be a part of this
effort. Because anecdotal accounts of colic have suggested some
gastrointestinal involvement we proposed to examine its possible biological
origins by using a noninvasive measure of gastric motility. The
electrogastrogram (EGG) has been used with adults and studies have found that
adults who suffer from motion sickness or experience nausea and vomiting
exhibit pattern of gastric dysrhythmia. Thus, we hypothesized that infants
with colic may be experiencing gastric discomfort which might be measured
using the EGG.
Early studies of colic have also suggested
that parents may contribute to their infants excessive crying. However, colic
is not restricted to firstborn infants whose parents would have little
experience. In addition, colic usually remits quite suddenly by 3 months of
age which implies that parents became more sensitive overnight. In this study
we examined parents personality, interactive style, and perceptions in an
effort to clarify their role in their child's crying. Finally, one of the criticisms lodged
against colic research is that many studies are retrospective or rely on
parents to refer their infant for problematic crying. Both methods introduce
bias into the sample as a certain type of parent may complain of colic or
remember their infants crying as intense. In our study we drew our colic
sample from a normative community sample and determined through special
interview techniques whether an infant was colicky or not. Infants and
families were recruited and tested at 2 weeks of age before the onset of
colic. Parents were called at 3, 4 and 5 weeks and asked open ended questions
about their infants cry behavior. Based on these reports colic was
identified. All parents were then asked to keep a 4 day, 24 hour diary that
recorded the infants crying (and other states). This data then verified our
determination of colic. While not completely without parental bias, this
method reduces it significantly. In addition, by recruiting and testing
infants before colic begins we are able to collect antecedent variables and
test their predictions to colic. The consequences of having colic were
examined in this study. Infants and their mothers returned to our lab at 5,
10 and 18 months when we put them through a series of tasks designed to
elicit different types of reactivity. We also assessed their interactive
behavior with their mothers. Finally, at 18 months the infants' social
competence was assessed in the form of compliance and empathic responding.
Visit our publications
page for recent articles on infant colic taken from the study. |
