= 1.42 years; 44.9% White) completed a 6-min sad mood discussion followed by a video-mediated recall procedure to continuously rate their experienced emotion during the discussion. Dyadic electrocardiogram data were continuously collected. Coders coded parent ERSB from video-recorded discussions. Second-by-second estimates of parent respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an index of vagal functioning, experienced emotion, and ERSB were obtained. Preliminary results suggested that, on average, in moments when parents exhibited relatively lower RSA, they were marginally more likely to engage in scaffolding. However, parents who exhibited relatively greater RSA and recalled more negative emotions in moments when they engaged in scaffolding exhibited more scaffolding behavior across the discussion. Concordance in RSA withdrawal and negative emotions was related to less use of acknowledgment. Parents who work harder to regulate their own emotions may struggle to acknowledge their child's emotions and scaffold their child's emotion understanding or facilitate problem-solving. Power analyses suggest future investigations would benefit from larger samples of at least 200 parents to assess between-parent correlates of within-parent processes. Results bear implications for future research that can inform prevention and intervention programs that seek to enhance parent ERSB. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Somers et al. (Mon,) studied this question.