Parent-Child Biobehavioural Synchrony

Parent and child stress, attention, and behaviour study

Antisocial Behaviour is highly prevalent, emerges in early childhood, exhibits considerable stability across the lifetime, and is associated with profound disability and high societal costs. Early intervention is critical and effective in reducing lifetime impairments, but 30% to 50% of children fail to achieve significant or sustained improvement. Predicting who is a good candidate for intervention has proven a major challenge to the field.

The proposed research is significant at individual, family, school, community, and societal levels because it aims to better understand the cognitive and biosocial characteristics of children and families that respond positively to intervention, why intervention works, and for whom gains are most likely to maintain over time.

Recent research findings from the research team have uncovered important differences in salivary hormone concentrations and patterns of emotional attention for different subgroups of antisocial individuals (Kimonis et al., 2018a; 2018b). Preliminary findings from other research groups have also revealed important differences between antisocial subgroups in parent-child bio-behavioural synchrony (Granger et al., 2007) and genetic factors (see Viding et al., 2013). Bio-behavioural synchrony describes the linkage and co-fluctuation in physiological stress responses of child and parent, and is supported by the theoretical frameworks of Feldman’s (2012) Biobehavioural Model of Parent-Child Synchrony and Booth, Carver, and Granger’s (2000) Biosocial Model of the Family.

This project will be the first to address whether integrating bio-behavioural synchrony and stress hormones into intervention studies adds value, and the nature of that value, in advancing knowledge about cognitive and biosocial causal mechanisms involved in antisocial behaviour. Findings have translational implications for identifying new intervention targets with specific subgroups of children with antisocial behaviour, thus benefitting society by improving well-being for more children with antisocial behaviour and their families.

Our research into salivary analytes of childhood antisocial behaviour is conducted in collaboration with the UNSW Salivary Bioscience Research Centre in the School of Psychology.