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Annual Research Review: Studying interpersonal interactions in developmental psychopathology.

Wass, S., Greenwood, E., Esposito, G., Smith, C., Necef, I., & Phillips, E. 2023. Institute of Psychology Psychiatry and Neuroscience

During development we transition from co-regulation (where regulatory processes are shared
between child and caregiver) to self-regulation. Most early co-regulatory interactions aim to
manage fluctuations in the infant’s arousal and alertness; but over time, co-regulatory
processes become progressively elaborated to encompass other functions such as sociocommunicative development, attention and executive control. The fundamental aim of coregulation is to help maintain an optimal ‘critical state’ between hypo- and hyper-activity.
Early co-regulatory processes involve both passive entrainment, through which a child’s state
entrains to the caregiver’s, and active contingent responsiveness, through which the caregiver
changes their behaviour in response to behaviours from the child. Contingent responsiveness
operates via negative feedback, through which the behavioural changes from the caregiver
compensate for increases and decreases in the child, to help maintain an intermediate critical
state. Similar principles, of interactive but asymmetric contingency, drive joint attention and
the maintenance of epistemic states as well as arousal/alertness, emotion regulation, and
socio-communicative development. Here, we review work that directly observed child-adult
co-regulatory interactions in the context of psychopathology. Early co-regulatory processes
are thought to play a role in the development of attachment and can develop atypically in a
range of ways, across conditions including premature birth, Autism, Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder, anxiety and depression. The most well-known of these is insufficient
contingent responsiveness, leading to reduced synchrony, which has been shown across a
range of modalities in different disorders, and which is the target of most current interventions.
We also present evidence that excessive contingent responsiveness/synchrony can develop in
some circumstances. And we show that positive feedback interactions can develop, which are
contingent but mutually amplificatory child-caregiver interactions that drive the child further
3
from their critical state. We discuss implications of these findings for future intervention
research, and directions for future work.

Vocal communication is tied to interpersonal arousal coupling in caregiver-infant dyads.

Wass, S., Phillips, E., Smith, C., Fatimehin, E. O., & Goupil, L. (2022). Elife

It has been argued that a necessary condition for the emergence of speech in humans is the ability to vocalise irrespective of underlying affective states, but when and how this happens during development remains unclear. To examine this, we used wearable microphones and autonomic sensors to collect multimodal naturalistic datasets from 12-month-olds and their caregivers. We observed that, across the day, clusters of vocalisations occur during elevated infant and caregiver arousal. This relationship is stronger in infants than caregivers: caregivers vocalisations show greater decoupling with their own states of arousal, and their vocal production is more influenced by the infant's arousal than their own. Different types of vocalisation elicit different patterns of change across the dyad. Cries occur following reduced infant arousal stability and lead to increased child-caregiver arousal coupling, and decreased infant arousal. Speech-like vocalisations also occur at elevated arousal, but lead to longer-lasting increases in arousal, and elicit more parental verbal responses. Our results suggest that: 12-month-old infants' vocalisations are strongly contingent on their arousal state (for both cries and speech-like vocalisations), whereas adults' vocalisations are more flexibly tied to their own arousal; that cries and speech-like vocalisations alter the intra-dyadic dynamics of arousal in different ways, which may be an important factor driving speech development; and that this selection mechanism which drives vocal development is anchored in our stress physiology.

Vocalisations and the Dynamics of Interpersonal Arousal Coupling in Caregiver-Infant dyads

Wass, S., Phillips, E., Smith, C., & Goupil, L. 2021. PsyArXiv

We currently understand little about how autonomic arousal influences early vocaldevelopment. To examine this, we used wearable microphones and autonomic sensors tocollect multimodal naturalistic datasets from 12-month-olds and their caregivers. Weobserved that, across the day, clusters of vocalisations occur during elevated infant andcaregiver arousal. This relationship is stronger in infants than caregivers:caregivers showgreater functional flexibility, and their vocal production is more influenced by the infant’sarousal than their own. Cries occur following reduced infant arousal stability and lead toincreased child-caregiver arousal coupling, and decreased infant arousal. Speech-likevocalisations also occur at elevated arousal, but lead to longer-lasting increases in arousal,and elicit more parental verbal responses. Our results suggest that vocal development is moredependent on interpersonal arousal coupling across caregiver-infant dyads than previously thought.

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