Dyadic Micro-Analysis of Emotion Coregulation in Mothers and their Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder: Relations to Children’s Developmental Outcomes

Successful emotion regulation is essential for developmental outcomes for children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Parent-child coregulation lays the foundation for the development of children’s self-regulation. This dissertation used a dyadic, micro-analysis approach to explore emotion coregulation between mothers and their children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder in low-stress and moderately-stressful contexts. The first study examined the structure and the content of emotion coregulation in relation to children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors in a low-stress context (Chapter 2). Findings demonstrated that dyadic positive engagement moderated the relationship between dyadic flexibility and maladaptive behaviors for children with ASD. The second study assessed dyadic repair processes in mothers and their children with ASD in a low-stress context (Chapter 3). Results showed that over half of dyads engaged in repair processes and such repair was associated with dyadic and child functioning. The third study investigated relations between early emotion coregulation processes in mother-child dyads in the moderately-stressful context of the Strange Situation and neurotypical children’s later socioemotional outcomes using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (Chapter 4). The structure and the content of mother-preschool-aged child emotion coregulation predicted aspects of children’s social competence and peer relationships in middle childhood. Findings from this dissertation have significant conceptual and methodological implications. The results contribute to the existing literature on early emotion coregulation by examining these dyadic processes in relation to children’s behavioral and socioemotional functioning. Moreover, the findings provide important information on mother-child emotion coregulation processes at the dyadic, micro-level across contexts (low-stress and moderately-stressful contexts) for both dyads of children with and without ASD