Physiological measurement of emotion from infancy to preschool: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

Abstract

Introduction Emotion regulation, the ability to regulate emotional responses to environmental stimuli, develops in the first years of life and plays an important role in the development of personality, social competence, and behavior. Substantial literature suggests a relationship between emotion regulation and cardiac physiology; specifically, heart rate changes in response to positive or negative emotion‐eliciting stimuli. Method This systematic review and meta‐analysis provide an in‐depth examination of research that has measured physiological responding during emotional‐evoking tasks in children from birth to 4 years of age. Results The review had three main findings. First, meta‐regressions resulted in an age‐related decrease in baseline and task‐related heart rate (HR) and increases in baseline and task‐related respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Second, meta‐analyses suggest task‐related increases in HR and decreases in RSA and heart rate variability (HRV), regardless of emotional valence of the task. Third, associations between physiological responding and observed behavioral regulation are not consistently present in children aged 4 and younger. The review also provides a summary of the various methodology used to measure physiological reactions to emotional‐evoking tasks, including number of sensors used and placement, various baseline and emotional‐evoking tasks used, methods for extracting RSA, as well as percentage of loss and reasons for loss for each study. Conclusion Characterizing the physiological reactivity of typically developing children is important to understanding the role emotional regulation plays in typical and atypical development.

Affect and gaze responses during an Emotion-Evoking Task in infants at an increased likelihood for autism spectrum disorder

“…These finding are important because they suggest our EE Task shows convergent validity with parent-reported temperament, specifically the affective responses during negative tasks for mask 1, mask 2, hair brushing, and face washing and gaze durations for baseline 1). These results are in line with a recent review by Sacrey et al [ 55 ], which reviewed physiological and affective responses during emotionally salient tasks and found that the overwhelming majority of studies used negatively salient tasks to elicit responses. That there were relationships between EE Task and the IBQ-R at 18 months for the combined and IL group, but not the LL group may be due to the age parameters of the IBQ-R.…”

“…A critical consideration when assessing ER is to determine whether the tasks are producing the expected result (i.e., the putatively negative tasks elicit negative responses [ 55 ]). The tasks used in this study were adapted from the Lab-TAB [ 24 ] and were designed to probe-specific emotions.…”

“…Some children in both groups responded in ways that were incongruent with the probed emotion, for example, smiling during toy removal. Despite this individual variability, we showed that the vast majority of responses aligned with the probed emotion, which may reflect the validity of the task (positive tasks were experienced as positive, and vice versa), and the placement of a neutral task between the positive and negative tasks to allow time to recover from the previous emotionally salient stimuli [ 55 , 58 ]. That our tasks appear valid is important because we chose tasks that children could experience in their day-to-day life that would be emotionally valanced (positive or negative) without being too emotionally arousing for the children (evidenced by the low means [< ± 1] for affect during negative and positive tasks).…”

“…As noted, we included three baseline periods within our testing protocol. The first allowed participants to acclimate to the testing environment and provided baseline values for affect and gaze, the second allowed an opportunity to recover to minimize carry-over from positive to negative tasks, and the third provided an opportunity to recover from stress produced by the negative tasks, per methodological recommendations [ 55 , 58 ]. Although we did collect heart rate data in this study, these were not examined in the current report.…”

A Neural Network Reveals Motoric Effects of Maternal Preconception Exposure to Nicotine on Rat Pup Behavior: A New Approach for Movement Disorders Diagnosis

“…We suggest that the analysis used here could be applied to the behavior of at-risk human infants in the way that it was applied here to infant rats. The development of behavior of human infants is also organized, and this organization is widely used to assess the attainment of developmental milestones ( Harris and Heriza, 1987 ; Sacrey et al, 2020 ). The assessment of milestones, however, depends upon the accuracy of the rating tool, the expertise of the rater, and it can be confounded by the normal developmental variability of infants.…”