UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF PARENTAL NIGHTTIME RESPONSIVENESS ON CHILD SOCIOEMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT: A STATE SPACE APPROACH
Open Access
- Author:
- Trainer, Austen
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 25, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Kristin Buss (she/her), Program Head/Chair
Douglas Teti, Outside Unit & Field Member
Erika Lunkenheimer, Major Field Member
Pamela Cole, Major Field Member
Kristin Buss, Chair & Dissertation Advisor - Keywords:
- parenting
infancy
internalizing
externalizing
attachment
nighttime
sleep
responsiveness
state space - Abstract:
- Infant sleep plays a crucial role in shaping the development of internalizing and externalizing behaviors and has been consistently linked with attachment, although the precise nature of this association is unclear. Parent responsiveness is believed to drive these outcomes, but what constitutes appropriate nighttime responsiveness, and particularly responsiveness to infant distress and non-distressed night wakings, remains a gap in the literature. State space analysis can be used to obtain measures of nighttime responsiveness which build upon those most commonly used in research on nighttime parenting and may help to fill this gap. The current study employed state space-derived measures of nighttime responsiveness to distress and non-distress at 6 months to predict attachment quality, internalizing behaviors, and externalizing behaviors at 12 months in 50, full-term infants (50% male / female). It was hypothesized that higher responsiveness to distress would predict adaptive developmental outcomes (i.e., higher attachment quality, lower internalizing and externalizing behaviors), and higher responsiveness to non-distress would predict maladaptive self-regulatory outcomes (i.e., higher internalizing and externalizing behaviors). The association between responsiveness to non-distress and attachment and the interactions between distinct state space derived measures of responsiveness were also explored. Findings provided mixed support for hypotheses. Responsiveness to distress was not found to be associated with attachment quality, nor was it consistently demonstrated to predict internalizing behaviors. However, responsiveness to non-distress was shown to predict higher internalizing behaviors as anticipated. Further, responsiveness to distress was unexpectedly associated with higher externalizing, though only when response duration was above average. Responsiveness to non-distress consistently predicted higher externalizing. Finally, responsiveness to non-distress was found to have a complex, albeit marginally significant, association with attachment such that higher likelihood to respond to non-distress predicts stronger attachment when response durations are shorter. These findings contribute to the existing literature exploring nighttime parenting behaviors, emphasizing the need for more sensitive measures of nighttime responsiveness contingent upon specific infant behaviors, highlighting the complexity of associations between parenting behaviors related to relative infant nighttime distress and infant developmental outcomes, and identifying important next steps to better understand these associations.