Emotion regulation of children exposed to cocaine

DESCRIPTION: (provided by applicant) Previous research with children prenatally exposed to cocaine has suggested a relation between prenatal cocaine exposure and children's emotion regulation and affect before age 2 years. This study will compare the impacts of contextual risk, maternal psychiatric status, and maternal prenatal, postnatal, and current cocaine use on children's emotion regulation and negative and positive affect at age 9 years. Child gender will be used as a moderator. Further, the ability of children's emotion regulation and negative and positive affect to mediate the relations between the predictors of contextual risk, mother's psychiatric status, mother's cocaine use, and the outcomes of children's attention, behavior and language development will be explored. This study is a secondary data analysis of ongoing research examining the impact of prenatal cocaine exposure on children's cognitive, behavioral, and attentional development. Additionally, emotion regulation and affect data will be coded using previously recorded videotapes and will provide the central variable for these analyses. The data set to be analyzed includes data collected from prenatally exposed 9-year-old children and their biological mothers (n=60), and from a retrospectively recruited contrast group (n=60). Maternal cocaine use for the prenatally exposed group was determined using hair and urine samples at child's delivery, at infant ages 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 months, and again from hair samples when the children were 9 years of age. Maternal cocaine use for the contrast group was determined using maternal self-report of prenatal and postnatal use, and from hair samples when the children were 9 years of age. A single contextual risk variable will be calculated, based on the work of Sameroff (1993), using the following risks: maternal occupation a I or 2 on the Hollingshead index; mother not a high school graduate; four or more children living in the home; no father figure in the home; high financial stress; stressful life events; negative neighborhood events; maternal endorsement of harsh parenting. Principal components analysis of the scores on the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory II (MCMI-11) scales most often associated with substance use will be combined to form a single psychiatric risk score. Children's attention will be measured using the Conners' Teacher Rating Scales; behavior, using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL); and language, using the Clinical Evaluation of Language Functioning (CELF). Analyses will include stepwise and hierarchical regressions and a mediational analysis. Results from this study will be disseminated via conferences and though submission of a manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal, and will also be used as pilot data for an R01 submission by the principal investigator.