(PS8-C71) Concordance of Mothers’ Subjective and Physiological Anger Arousal and the Link Between Maternal and Child Psychopathology

Offspring of parents with borderline personality disorder (BPD), where anger is a cardinal emotion are at elevated risk of developing psychopathology themselves (APA, 2022; Kurdziel et al., 2018). To understand mechanisms of intergenerational transmission, it may help to understand how anger presents in parents with BPD, particularly during conflict, when regulating emotions is hard. Emotion concordance is the degree to which a person’s emotion responses co-occur across channels (Mauss et al., 2005). Low concordance (e.g., being highly aroused, but reporting less anger), can indicate successful emotion regulation; when regulatory systems are overwhelmed, greater concordance may be observed (Hollenstein et., 2014). Given emotion dysregulation in BPD, we predicted that parents with higher BPD severity would show more concordance between physiological and self-reported anger during conflict with children. We further expected that parents’ high anger concordance would be associated with emerging psychopathology symptoms in their children.

A diverse sample of adolescents enriched for emotion dysregulation (M_age = 12.03 yrs; 47% female; 60% racial/ethnic minority) participated with their parents (94% women). Parent BPD was assessed using a gold-standard interview (SIDP-IV; Pfohl et al., 1997), scored to produce dimensional severity scores. Child psychopathology was captured using a composite of parent- and child-reported internalizing and externalizing symptoms (CBCL; Achenbach, 1999). Dyads completed a physiological baseline and an 8-minute conflict discussion. Parents reported their anger on a 1-5 scale at baseline and post-conflict. To capture parents’ physiological responding during each task, we assessed respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA) (lower values indicate higher cardiovascular activation). We used a linear regression model to test each prediction. Both models were adjusted for baseline anger and RSA values and relevant covariates.

The first model, as expected, parent BPD severity moderated the relationship between parent RSA and self-reported anger, b = -.03, p =.003. Specifically, the Johnson-Neyman technique (JNT) indicated that when parent BPD severity was very high (i.e., the most severe 8% of parents), RSA was inversely associated with anger intensity, indicating high emotion concordance. The second model examined whether child symptom severity was predicted by an interaction between parent RSA and self-reported anger during conflict. As expected, parent RSA and anger during conflict interacted to predict child symptoms, b= -4.96, p=.03. The JNT indicated that parent RSA inversely predicted child symptom severity when parents reported high anger (i.e., in 32% of the sample). That is, children had higher symptom severity when parents showed highly concordant anger during conflict.

 


In sum, BPD was associated with high anger concordance or cardiovascular arousal co-occurring with intense angry feelings, and this concordant presentation, in turn, was related to emerging child symptoms. Findings help extend the emerging topic of emotion concordance into dyadic research. Concordance of emotional displays may be relevant to the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology