Recurrence Plots of Mother-Child Autonomic Nervous System Predict Mother's Stress

Recent studies have suggested that physiological synchrony between a child and a caregiver in daily interaction could be a sensitive biomarker for parenting problems, such as childcare stress. One way to measure the physiological synchrony is to investigate the dynamics of child-caregiver co-regulation of their interoceptive states, e.g., the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) activities. The ANS has a direct role in the physical response to stress. The wealth of information rich in ANS data, especially long-timescale data, is hard to quantify adequately by simple statistical measurements. Therefore, this study introduces a Recurrence Plot (RP) to visualize the circadian rhythm of the daylong ANS data and mutual physiological regulation between a child and a caregiver. Furthermore, we utilize a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) model to predict the mothers' parenting stress using the quantified ANS complexity from RPs. The results show that mothers' parenting stress is predictable by their own ANS activities as well as by the interactive partner, i.e., their children.