Charting biobehavioural synchrony: impact on socio-affective development of a vulnerable preschool preterm population

From the very start of life, children grow up in close physical proximity with their caregivers. As a result of this social and bodily embeddedness, biological and behavioural processes become entrained and coordinated with the interacting partner (i.e. biobehavioural synchrony), preparing the child to live in social groups. Recent technological advances allow us now to quantify this social attunement in real-life interactions, by simultaneously recording multiple biobehavioural signals from multiple partners and investigating how these co-fluctuate. Here, for the first time, we will apply these cutting-edge new methods to understand atypical development. We will focus on a cohort of prematurely born preschool children, known to be at risk for atypical socio-emotional development. This particular cohort has already been studied from birth onwards, yielding a unique longitudinal database of medical, physiological, psychological and endocrinological parameters of both child and parents. At the age of five, we will assess biobehavioural synchrony across multiple contexts (including 24-hour naturalistic home recordings) and multiple interaction constellations (including for the first time mother-child as well as father-child synchrony). We will investigate how individual parent and child characteristics determine the quality of dual biobehavioural synchrony, and how these jointly impact on typical and atypical socio-emotional development.