Presenter(s): Nisha Sridhar
Co Presenter(s): Camille Sullivan
Faculty Mentor(s): Tyson Barker
Poster 114
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
Although parenting is a naturally rewarding activity, excess stressors such as food and housing insecurity impact a caregiver’s interactions with their children. Existing literature suggests that a caregiver’s reaction to their child’s social-communicative signals — known as responsive caregiving — is a strong predictor of positive child outcomes; however, the degree to which each parent engages in this practice varies greatly. Thus, to maximize responsive caregiving and consequently support child development, it is important to identify the mechanisms by which stress impacts parenting. Our goal is to determine the presence of a neurobiological indicator of caregiver reward that can provide insight on how stress impacts responsive caregiving, which would provide a quantitative way to measure the effectiveness of parenting interventions.
To examine these mechanisms, we recruited mothers with children ages 3-6 to observe their children complete simple computer tasks. During the tasks, the mother and child wear electroencephalogram (EEG) caps, which monitors the brain’s electrical activity, measuring observational reward positivity (observational RP) — the extent to which the mother responds positively when the computer rewards her child. While other studies have examined neurobiological components of caregiving via fMRI, the EEG can be operated in a social setting that mimics real-life caregiver-child interactions.
The expected outcome includes the identification of a proposed neurological mechanism that demonstrates the reduction of responsive caregiving as a result of parental stress. With the collected EEG data, survey information, and coded observed interactions, we intend to analyze the extent of the correlation between caregiving reward and observational RP. We additionally intend to examine the correlation between responsive caregiving and observational RP.