Yelim Hong ‘23PhD has received a NIH K99/R00: Pathway to Independence Award (NICHD) for her project "Parental response to children's negative emotions: Impact on neural and physiological self-regulation."
Effective emotion regulation (ER) is essential for healthy development, as difficulties in ER are linked to emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges. From early in life, children rely on their parents’ responses to manage negative emotions, making these interactions key to developing adaptive ER skills. Yet, little is known about how parents’ real-time responses during emotional moments influence the biological systems that support children’s regulation.
A new K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award will address this critical gap by investigating how in-the-moment parenting behaviors shape children’s neural and physiological regulation. Guided by NICHD’s Strategic Objective 4—“improving child and adolescent health and the transition to adulthood”—the project will examine how parental responses affect children’s neural and cardiac activity, specifically EEG alpha asymmetry and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). These biomarkers provide unique insight into how children regulate emotions at the biological level.
The study also considers the broader parent-child relationship context. Researchers hypothesize that relationship quality—such as warmth, closeness, and conflict—plays a vital role in moderating how parental responses influence children’s regulation. By combining detailed observational coding of parent-child interactions with EEG and ECG data, the project will offer a dynamic, multi-level view of how supportive versus unsupportive responses shape children’s emotion regulation.
Ultimately, this work has the potential to advance developmental science and inform family-based interventions by showing how everyday parenting behaviors influence the biological foundations of children’s emotional health.