Parenting at Risk
Faculty Affiliate Research Projects

Parenting across the developmental period is key to healthy child development, yet there are numerous conditions that place parenting at risk. Some factors are intrinsic to parents, such as parental psychopathology or parental history of maltreatment as a child. Other factors such as poverty or stress can be ecological, while still others involve developmental characteristics and processes specific to children. Understanding the nature of parenting risk, as well as the mechanisms that determine its course and influence, forms the basis of this initiative and the various projects that currently address it. The Children Youth Family Consortium (CYFC) has provided initial funding to support the development of a major research effort that will integrate neuroscience and biological approaches with notions of culture and ecology and family interaction with a focus on understanding emotion based processes in parenting. Prevention and intervention are also key aspects of this initiative that will be addressed in future research.

Parenting At Risk Faculty:

Lead Faculty:
Doug Teti, Professor, Human Development and Family Studies

Sandy Azar, Professor, Psychology
Pamela Cole, Professor, Psychology
Mark Feinberg, Research Associate, Prevention Research Center
Mark Greenberg, Professor, Human Development and Family Studies
Jeffrey Lorberbaum, Assistant Professor, Child Psychiatry, Hershey Medical Center
Susan McHale, Professor, Human Development and Family Studies
Ginger Moore, Assistant Professor, Psychology
Lara Robinson, Post Doctoral Fellow, Early Childhood Mental Health Integrative Research Training Program
Elizabeth Skowron, Associate Professor, Counseling Psychology
Laureen Teti, Acting Director, Child Study Center
Susan Woodhouse, Assistant Professor, Counseling Psychology

Here is a sampling of some of the research, both current and past, that Child Study Center faculty who are affiliated with the Parenting at Risk Research Initiative are conducting or have conducted:

Parenting at Risk: Contributions from Affective Neuroscience
Interdisciplinary Team (Doug Teti, PI, Pamela Cole, Sandra Azar, Michael Wenger, Bill Ray, Mark Feinberg, Jeffrey Lorberbaum of Hershey Medical Center, and James Coan, of University of Virginia)

Parenting is commonly identified as one of several major contributors to the development of child psychopathology. However, despite widespread agreement that parenting is complex and emotionally driven, studies of on-line processing and emotion regulation in parents, and of linkages between these processes and parenting quality, are rare. Recent discoveries in the field of affective neuroscience hold great promise for clarifying the neuroaffective processes that place parenting at risk. The goal of the present study is to make use of the tools of affective neuroscience to develop procedures designed to tap mothers' capacities for regulating emotion in response to child-created emotion-eliciting events. This study makes use of electroencephalographic (EEG) procedures to examine mothers' prefrontal cortical (PFC) asymmetries in the alpha bandwidth, and changes in these asymmetries, in response to pre-recorded and live child-created emotional stimuli). In addition, it makes use of event related potential (ERP) techniques to examine mothers' capacities for regulating emotion in response to aversive infant stimuli, such as crying. We hope to identify valid procedures to assessing emotion regulatory capacities in mothers in the context of parenting that can be used in an ongoing program of research examining the precursors and impact of parenting at risk.

A Study of Parenting: Social Information Processing, Intelligence, Child Neglect
Sandy Azar

Parents of low intellectual functioning have been seen as at high risk for abuse and neglect of their children. Indeed, as many as one third of child protection cases involve parents with IQ's in the mentally retarded or borderline mentally retarded range. Little is known on how low intellectual level translates into parenting problems. This lack of knowledge makes identifying the parents within this population who are most at risk, and tailoring interventions to meet their needs, difficult. This study, led by Dr. Sandy Azar, examines social information processing capacities as possible mediators and risk indicators between parenting behaviors and parental IQ. In the model that acts as a framework for the project, parents are viewed as "thinkers", where the adequacy of parents' responses is seen as depending upon the complexity and accuracy of the information they take in as they engage in childrearing and how they interpret that information. We examine whether these social information processing problems distinguish neglectful parents from non-neglecting parents, and also, whether they distinguish cognitively limited parents who have been neglectful from cognitively limited parents who have not. Further, we will examine whether these disturbances are also linked to more general adult interpersonal competencies and to more basic neuropsychological capacities (e.g., being cognitively flexible). Finally, the project will attempt to link these disturbances directly to specific elements of neglect, including observed interaction patterns with children, levels of home safety and hygiene, household adequacy, beliefs about children's supervision needs, and attitudes toward injury prevention, as well as to children's social and cognitive development. Dr. Azar is conducting a pilot feasibility study in Philadelphia in 2006-2007, with funding from Penn State University's Children, Youth, Family Consortium and with the Department of Human Services approval.

Child Maltreatment, Parenting Processes, and Emotion Regulation
Elizabeth Skowron

What are the mechanisms underlying early childhood deficits in self regulation in at-risk families? In our 5-year NIMH-funded study, we are modeling patterns of interactive synchrony, rupture, and repair that unfold over time in the sequential interactions of maltreating and non-maltreating mothers and their preschool children. We examine the role of relationship ruptures and repairs in young children's developing capacities for self and emotion regulation, and their skills at engaging parent assistance in self regulation. This project addresses several current gaps in the child maltreatment literature, including examining patterns of parent-child interactive patterns associated with severity and subtype of maltreatment, focusing on neurophysiological and behavioral assessment of emotion regulation in both mothers and their preschool children, and tracking the bidirectional influence of mother and child on patterns of interactive rupture and repair. Our research team is comprised of clinical, counseling, and developmental researchers with expertise in studying parenting at risk. Our goal is to translate these basic research findings into the development of testable CM interventions that target specific patterns of interactive disruption identified in maltreating families. Pilot research for this study was funded by a Children, Youth, & Families Consortium Level II grant, and a Research Initiation Grant from the College of Education.

Mother and Infant Emotion Study
Susan Woodhouse

The development of emotion regulation capacities is crucial for healthy interpersonal relationships, socioemotional adjustment, and behavioral self-control in the first few years of life, and has important implications for later attention, cognition, and school readiness. Emotion regulation is thought to develop as a function not only of the infant's own temperament, but also the caregiving style to which the infant is exposed. We are interested in understanding why some mothers are able to soothe their infants and provide a secure base whereas other mother are not able to do so at times of infant distress. Maternal caregiving behaviors are associated with maternal attachment representations, but the mechanisms through which these relations occur are little understood. Our hope is that a better understanding of the mechanisms through which mothers' responses to infant distress are determined could be useful in designing interventions for mothers and infants. One hypothesis that has received relatively little empirical attention to date is the idea that mothers with differing attachment representations (based on their own attachment experiences) may vary in their stress reactivity to infant distress, and may also vary in their capacity to regulate emotions that occur in response to infant distress. In this study of 4.5 to 6 month-old infants and their mothers we examine maternal responses to the infant at times of infant distress and four key sets of variables: (a) physiological markers of emotion regulation in both mother and baby (i.e., parasympathetic nervous system activation as indexed by heart rate variability in the mothers and infants); (b) physiological indicators of stress reactions in both mother and baby (i.e., as indexed by the hormone cortisol and the enzyme a-amylase present in the mothers' and infants' saliva); (c) mothers' self-reports about her own emotional reactions, attributions and representations of infant distress; and (d) mothers' own state of mind with respect to attachment along with later infant attachment at 12 months. Preliminary data are currently being collected at the Capital Area Health and Human Development Institute in Harrisburg, PA. This project is led by Susan Woodhouse, and co-investigators include Doug Teti, Cynthia Stifter, and Rick Fiene.

Overall, the Parenting at Risk research initiative aims to continue developing the pilot projects outlined above, to involve graduate students in this work, to publish from these studies, and to use these pilot efforts to continue to seek external funding. The initiative is strongly multidisciplinary, pulling research scientists from Human Development and Family Studies, Psychology, Counseling Psychology, and the Prevention Research Center . Collaborative networks have been established with the University of Virginia (UVA) and Hershey Medical Center (HMC), and these collaborations continue to grow. Indeed, the current networks established with UVA and HMC are the direct result of efforts by the Child Study Center to bring in distinguished scientists from these institutions to contribute to the projects outlined above.