Associations between respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity and effortful control in preschool-age children

作者：Sulik Michael J; Eisenberg Nancy^*; Spinrad Tracy L; Silva Kassondra M

来源：Developmental Psychobiology, 2015, 57(5): 596-606.

DOI：10.1002/dev.21315

• effortful control
• executive function
• respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)
• vagal tone
• self-regulation

We tested whether respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity in response to each of three self-regulation tasks (bird and dragon; knock-tap; and gift wrap) would predict self-regulation performance in a sample of 101 preschool-age children (M age=4.49, SD=.64). While controlling for baseline RSA, decreases in RSA from bird and dragon to knock-tap (but not from baseline to bird and dragon) predicted a latent variable measuring self-regulation. Furthermore, increases in RSA from the knock-tap to gift wrapthe only task involving delay of gratificationwere related to concurrent task performance while controlling for the relation between RSA reactivity and the latent self-regulation variable. Results suggest that the relations between RSA reactivity and self-regulatory ability are influenced by task-specific demands and possibly by task order. Furthermore, RSA reactivity appears to relate differently to performance on motivationally salient self-regulation tasks such as delay of gratification relative to cool executive function tasks.

• 出版日期2015-7