Mindful Coping Power Effects on Children's Autonomic Nervous System Functioning and Long-Term Behavioral Outcomes

Caroline L Boxmeyer; Catanya G Stager; Shari Miller; John E Lochman; Devon E Romero; Nicole P Powell; Chuong Bui; Lixin Qu

doi:10.3390/jcm12113621

Mindful Coping Power Effects on Children's Autonomic Nervous System Functioning and Long-Term Behavioral Outcomes

J Clin Med. 2023 May 23;12(11):3621. doi: 10.3390/jcm12113621.

Authors

Caroline L Boxmeyer^{1

2}, Catanya G Stager³, Shari Miller⁴, John E Lochman^{2

5}, Devon E Romero⁶, Nicole P Powell², Chuong Bui^{2

7}, Lixin Qu⁸

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, College of Community Health Sciences, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA.
² Center for Youth Development and Intervention, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA.
³ Division of Preventive Medicine, Heersink School of Medicine, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294, USA.
⁴ Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27516, USA.
⁵ Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Alabam, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA.
⁶ Department of Counseling, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA.
⁷ Alabama Life Research Institute, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA.
⁸ Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27516, USA.

Abstract

Mindful Coping Power (MCP) was developed to enhance the effects of the Coping Power (CP) preventive intervention on children's reactive aggression by integrating mindfulness training into CP. In prior pre-post analyses in a randomized trial of 102 children, MCP improved children's self-reported anger modulation, self-regulation, and embodied awareness relative to CP but had fewer comparative effects on parent- and teacher-reported observable behavioral outcomes, including reactive aggression. It was hypothesized that MCP-produced improvements in children's internal awareness and self-regulation, if maintained or strengthened over time with ongoing mindfulness practice, would yield improvements in children's observable prosocial and reactive aggressive behavior at later time points. To appraise this hypothesis, the current study examined teacher-reported child behavioral outcomes at a one-year follow-up. In the current subsample of 80 children with one-year follow-up data, MCP produced a significant improvement in children's social skills and a statistical trend for a reduction in reactive aggression compared with CP. Further, MCP produced improvements in children's autonomic nervous system functioning compared with CP from pre- to post-intervention, with a significant effect on children's skin conductance reactivity during an arousal task. Mediation analyses found that MCP-produced improvements in inhibitory control at post-intervention mediated program effects on reactive aggression at the one-year follow-up. Within-person analyses with the full sample (MCP and CP) found that improvements in respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity were associated with improvements in reactive aggression at the one-year follow-up. Together, these findings indicate that MCP is an important new preventive tool to improve embodied awareness, self-regulation, stress physiology, and observable long-term behavioral outcomes in at-risk youth. Further, children's inhibitory control and autonomic nervous system functioning emerged as key targets for preventive intervention.

Keywords: Mindful Coping Power; autonomic nervous system; inhibitory control; mindfulness; polyvagal theory; prevention; reactive aggression; respiratory sinus arrhythmia; self-regulation; skin conductance.

Grants and funding

R34 DA035946/DA/NIDA NIH HHS/United States