Author:

Abstract:

Prematurity can have lifelong implications for a child’s (mental) health and development. The survival rate of preterm infants has increased over time, but many are at risk of adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. Due to altered brain maturation, exposure to early stressors in the neonatal intensive care unit and atypical early mother-infant interactions, preterm birth can negatively impact the stress-regulation system as well as verbal communicative abilities. The aim of this study is to investigate socio-emotional development of preterm born preschoolers, by mapping conversation patterns to physiological arousal regulation. The study will contrast physiological arousal regulation, turn-taking behaviour and emotion vocabulary use in 65 preterm versus 25 term-born mother-child dyads. The dyads will discuss a positive and a negative shared event during a semi-structured interaction paradigm. The dyadic interactions are audio and video-recorded and physiological signals are simultaneously measured. Parameters such as heart rate variability, inter/intra-speaker silences, overlapping speech, and the amount of positive and negative emotion vocabulary, will be extracted and analysed. We hypothesise that children born prematurely will exhibit difficulties regulating physiological arousal, engaging in fluent turn-taking behaviour, and expressing emotions through emotion vocabulary, particularly during negative emotional state interaction. We also predict a positive association between maternal and child's physiological arousal and verbal emotional expression in term-born dyads and a reduced association in the preterm dyads. Analyses are ongoing and will be finalized before the conference. These findings will contribute to a better understanding of the socio-emotional development of preterm born preschoolers.