A Dynamic Systems Approach to Mother-Child Emotion Co-Regulation in Relation to Adaptive Functioning in Children with ASD

Background:  Emotion regulation plays a crucial role in the development of adaptive skills. Children’s emotion regulation is believed to arise out of repeated emotional experiences with their caregivers (Sroufe, 1996). Few studies have conceptualized moment-to-moment emotion coregulation in dyadic interaction of parent and child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A dynamic systems method was chosen for this study because this approach is able to capture repeated moment-to-moment processes inherent in a dyadic interaction (DiDonato, England, Martin, & Amazeen, 2013; Hollenstein, 2011).

Objectives:  To investigate the associations between emotion co-regulation and (1) communication, (2) daily skills, and (3) socialization among ASD children from a dynamic systems approach. 

Methods:  Sixty dyads of mothers and children with ASD were recruited to participate in the study. Mothers and children participated in a 10-minute Three Boxes procedure (Vandell, 1979; Tamis-LeMonda, Shannon, Cabrera, & Lamb, 2004), which was a low stress dyadic mother-child interaction.  An original coding scheme was developed to evaluate positive engagement, negative engagement, and disengagement in dyadic mother-child interaction every five-second intervals using Mangold International’s INTERACT 9.47 software (Mangold, 2007). Intercoder agreement in the assigned child and mother engagement code was 91.86% (k = 0.81) and 91.85% (k = 0.82). The observation data were imported into the State Space Grid (SSG) software (Lamey, Hollenstein, Lewis, & Granic, 2004) to operationalize structure of emotion co-regulation indicated by dispersion (an index of spread of emotional states), and content of emotion coregulation indicated by mutual positive interaction and mutual negative or disengaged interaction.  The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales measure was used to measure adaptive behavior in the children (Sparrow et al., 2005). Spearman’s rank correlations were used for analysis.

Results:  As expected, mutual negative or disengaged interactions were negatively correlated with communication (r = -.65, p = .002), daily living skills (r = -.51, p = .02), and socialization (r = -.55, p = .01); additionally, mutual positive interaction was positively correlated with communication (r = .54, p = .01). Unexpectedly, flexibility was negatively correlated with communication (r = -.55, p = .01), daily living skills (r = -.50, p = .03), and socialization (r = -.43, p = .059). 

Conclusions:  To our knowledge, the current study is the first to operationalize emotional structure and content of interaction in dyads of children with ASD and their mothers using the State Space Grid method. The preliminary findings of emotional content suggest that involvement of mother in the intervention could be a critical component. An increase in mutual positive interaction and decrease in mutual negative or disengaged interaction may improve adaptive functioning in children with ASD. The results of structure of emotion co-regulation indicate that a wide change in emotional state in low stressful context may not be favorable for emotion regulation skill in child with ASD.