INTERGENERATIONAL SUPPORT AND WELL-BEING OF OLDER ADULTS IN CHANGING FAMILY CONTEXTS

This dissertation consists of three papers that examine the complexities in upward intergenerational support and adult children’s influence on older adults’ health in changing family contexts of America and China. The prevalence of “gray divorce/repartnering ” in later life after age 55 is on the rise in the United States, yet little is known about its effect on intergenerational support. The first paper uses the life course perspective to examine whether gray divorce and repartnering affect support from biological and stepchildren differently than early divorce and repartnering, and how patterns differ by parents’ gender. Massive internal migration in China has led to increased geographic distance between adult children and aging parents, which may have consequences for old age support received by parents. This topic has yet to be thoroughly explored in China, as most studies of intergenerational support to older parents have focused on the role of coresident children or have not considered the interdependence of multiple parent-child dyads in the family. The second paper adopts the within-family differences approach to assess the influence of non-coresident children’s relative living proximity to parents compared to that of their siblings on their provision of support to parents in rural and urban Chinese families. The study also examines how patterns of the impact are moderated by parents’ living arrangement, non-coresident children’s gender, and parents’ provision of support to children. Taking a multigenerational network perspective, the third paper questions if and how adult children’s socioeconomic status (SES) influences older parents’ health in China. It further examines whether health benefits brought by adult children’s socioeconomic attainment are larger for older adults with lower SES and whether one of the mechanisms through which adult children’s SES affects older parents’ health is by changing their health behaviors. These questions are highly relevant in contemporary China, where adult children have experienced substantial gains in SES and play a central role in old age support for parents. In sum, these three papers take the life course, the within-family differences, and the multigenerational network perspective to address the complexities in intergenerational support and older adults’ health in diverse family contexts.

The Effect of Supportive Social Interaction Priming on Children's Prosocial Comforing Responses to Distressed Others

The ability to sensitively care for others’ wellbeing develops early in ontogeny and is an important developmental milestone for healthy social, emotional, and moral development. One facet of care for others, prosocial comforting, has been linked with important social outcomes such as peer acceptance and friendship quality, underscoring the importance of determining factors involved in the ability to comfort. Although social support has been linked with a number of important social outcomes, no study has directly examined whether felt social support can foster children’s positive behavior toward others. The purpose of the current investigation was to use an experimental priming paradigm to demonstrate that felt social support a) enhances children’s ability to respond prosocially to the distress of others and b) decreases children’s expressions of personal distress when faced with the distress of another person. Participants were 94 4-year-old children (M = 53.56 months, SD = 3.38 months; 52 girls). Children were randomly assigned to either view pictures of mothers and children in close, personal interactions (supportive social interaction condition), happy women and children in separate pictures, presented side-by-side (happy control condition), or pictures of colorful overlapping shapes (neutral control condition). Each set of 20 pictures was presented in the context of a categorization computer game that participants played 4 times throughout the course of the study. Immediately following the first three computer games, children were given the opportunity to comfort someone who was distressed; twice it was the adult experimenter working with the child, and once it was an unseen infant crying over a monitor that participants had been trained to use. Comforting behaviors and distress/arousal were coded in 10-second time segments and yielded a global comforting score and a distress proportion score for each task. Results indicated that priming condition had no effect on either prosocial comforting behavior or expressions of personal distress. I discuss these null findings in light of the available literatures on priming mental representations in children and on prosocial comforting, and suggest some future directions for continued investigation in both fields.

Reflections on Children

In the Fall 2004, while preparing my dissertation project “Reflections on children,” I realized that whether art songs, operatic arias or scenes, the classical repertory offers a wide variety of masterpieces regarding all aspects of children’s life. My first dissertation recital is called “Journeys” and was performed on December 6th 2004 at 8:00pm in the Tawes Recital Hall. Change is the only inevitable condition in life and as such, it has been thought-provoking to many poets and composers. The narrator in Mahler’s Wayfarer Songs experiences the pain of love for the first time and emerges transformed into an adult. The narrator in Barber’s Knoxville is an adult looking back at his journey in an attempt to understand himself. The mothers in Britten’s Charm of Lullabies each make every effort to accept the changes in their own life after the birth of her baby. Finally, both Brahms’ songs are about risks and losses. “Destinies” is the title of the second dissertation recital as it attempts to capture the dark fate of Mignon and of Rückert/Mahler’s children. It was performed on April 8th 2005 in the Tawes Recital Hall. Mignon’s grief is portrayed through songs full of sadness and hopelessness in mourning of a long lost childhood. Rückert wrote 425 Kindertotenlieder in memory of his children’s deaths over a period of twenty years and Mahler orchestrated five of them. Mahler’s choices deal with light and darkness, symbolizing eternal life and hope versus despair and death, in both the literal and the literary sense. Finally, the third dissertation recital called “Blessings” was performed on May 19th 2005 in the Tawes Recital Hall. It relies on the evocation of moods and scenes created by a variety of composers and poets. Poulenc’s La Courte Paille are brief works in the style of a child’s song with unrelated and unexpected images juxtaposed, creating a sense of inner monologues. John Greer’s House of Tomorrow, Guastavino’s Cradle Songs and the rest of the composers offer wonderful pieces of immense power and expression in their directness and sensitive contour.

Nurturing Change: Lilly Martin Spencer's Images of Children

This dissertation is the first full-length study to concentrate on American genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer's images of children, which constituted nearly one half of her saleable production during the height of her artistic career from 1848 to 1869. At this time, many young parents received advice regarding child rearing through books and other publications, having moved away from their families of origin in search of employment. These literatures, which gained in popularity from the 1830s onward, focused on spiritual, emotional, and disciplinary matters. My study considers four major themes from the period's writing on child nurture that changed over time, including depravity and innocence, parent/child bonding, standards of behavior and moral rectitude, and children's influence on adults. It demonstrates how Spencer's paintings, prints, and drawings featuring children supported and challenged these evolving ideologies, helping to shed light not only on the artist's reception of child-rearing advice, but also on its possible impact on her middle-class audience, to whom she closely catered. In four chapters, I investigate Spencer's images of sleeping children as visual equivalents of contemporary consolation literature during a time of high infant and child mortality rates; her paintings of parent/child interaction as promoting separation from mothers and emotional bonding with fathers; her prints of mischievous children as both considering changing ideals about children's behavior and comforting Anglo-American citizens afraid of what they saw as threatening minority groups; and her pictures with Civil War and Reconstruction subject matter as contending with the popular concept of the moral utility of children. By framing my interpretations of Spencer's output around key issues in the period's dynamic child-nurture literature, I advance new comprehensive readings of many of her most well-known paintings, including Domestic Happiness, Fi, Fo, Fum!, and The Pic Nic or the Fourth of July. I also consider work often overlooked by other art historians, but which received acclaim in Spencer's own time, including the lithographs of children made after her designs, and the allegorical painting Truth Unveiling Falsehood. Significantly, I provide the first in-depth analysis of a newly rediscovered Reconstruction-era painting, The Home of the Red, White, and Blue.

Impact of Cryptosporidium spp. interaction with co-occurring microorganisms on moderate-to-severe diarrhea in the developing world

Diarrheal illness is responsible for over a quarter of all deaths in children under 5 years of age in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Recent findings have identified the parasite Cryptosporidium as a contributor to enteric disease. We examined 9,348 cases and 13,128 controls from the Global Enteric Multicenter Study to assess whether Cryptosporidium interacted with co-occurring pathogens based on adjusted odds of moderate-to-severe diarrhea (MSD). Cryptosporidium was found to interact negatively with Shigella spp., with multiplicative interaction score of 0.16 (95% CI: 0.07 to 0.37, p-value=0.000), and an additive interaction score of -9.81 (95% CI: -13.61 to -6.01, p-value=0.000). Cryptosporidium also interacted negatively with Aeromonas spp., Adenovirus, Norovirus, and Astrovirus with marginal significance. Odds of MSD for Cryptosporidium co-infection with Shigella spp., Aeromonas spp., Adenovirus, Norovirus, or Astrovirus are lower than odds of MSD with either organism alone. This may reduce the efficacy of intervention strategies targeted at Cryptosporidium.

Developmental Neural Correlates of Social Interaction

Children develop in a sea of reciprocal social interaction, but their brain development is predominately studied in non-interactive contexts (e.g., viewing photographs of faces). This dissertation investigated how the developing brain supports social interaction. Specifically, novel paradigms were used to target two facets of social experience—social communication and social motivation—across three studies in children and adults. In Study 1, adults listened to short vignettes—which contained no social information—that they believed to be either prerecorded or presented over an audio-feed by a live social partner. Simply believing that speech was from a live social partner increased activation in the brain’s mentalizing network—a network involved in thinking about others’ thoughts. Study 2 extended this paradigm to middle childhood, a time of increasing social competence and social network complexity, as well as structural and functional social brain development. Results showed that, as in adults, regions of the mentalizing network were engaged by live speech. Taken together, these findings indicate that the mentalizing network may support the processing of interactive communicative cues across development. Given this established importance of social-interactive context, Study 3 examined children’s social motivation when they believed they were engaged in a computer-based chat with a peer. Children initiated interaction via sharing information about their likes and hobbies and received responses from the peer. Compared to a non-social control, in which children chatted with a computer, peer interaction increased activation in mentalizing regions and reward circuitry. Further, within mentalizing regions, responsivity to the peer increased with age. Thus, across all three studies, social cognitive regions associated with mentalizing supported real-time social interaction. In contrast, the specific social context appeared to influence both reward circuitry involvement and age-related changes in neural activity. Future studies should continue to examine how the brain supports interaction across varied real-world social contexts. In addition to illuminating typical development, understanding the neural bases of interaction will offer insight into social disabilities such as autism, where social difficulties are often most acute in interactive situations. Ultimately, to best capture human experience, social neuroscience ought to be embedded in the social world.

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF POINT-OF-VIEW VIDEO MODELING IN TEACHING SOCIAL INITIATION SKILLS TO CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS

Deficits in social communication and interaction have been identified as distinguishing impairments for individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As a pivotal skill, the successful development of social communication and interaction in individuals with ASD is a lifelong objective. Point-of-view video modeling has the potential to address these deficits. This type of video involves filming the completion of a targeted skill or behavior from a first-person perspective. By presenting only what a person might see from his or her viewpoint, it has been identified to be more effective in limiting irrelevant stimuli by providing a clear frame of reference to facilitate imitation. The current study investigated the use of point-of-view video modeling in teaching social initiations (e.g., greetings). Using a multiple baseline across participants design, five kindergarten participants were taught social initiations using point-of-view video modeling and video priming. Immediately before and after viewing the entire point-of-view video model, the participants were evaluated on their social initiations with a trained, typically developing peer serving as a communication partner. Specifically, the social initiations involved participants’ abilities to shift their attention toward the peer who entered the classroom, maintain attention toward the peer, and engage in an appropriate social initiation (e.g., hi, hello). Both generalization and maintenance were tested. Overall, the data suggest point-of-view video modeling is an effective intervention for increasing social initiations in young students with ASD. However, retraining was necessary for acquisition of skills in the classroom environment. Generalization in novel environments and with a novel communication partner, and generalization to other social initiation skills was limited. Additionally, maintenance of gained social initiation skills only occurred in the intervention room. Despite the limitations of the study and variable results, there are a number of implications moving forward for both practitioners and future researchers examining point-of-view modeling and its potential impact on the social initiation skills of individuals with ASD.

The relationship of early social, mental, and behavioral experiences with adult obesity and Alcohol Use Disorder

Stressful life events early in life, including symptoms of mental disorders or childhood maltreatment, may increase risk for worse mental and physical health outcomes in adulthood. The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the effects of childhood Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms and maltreatment experience on two adult outcomes: obesity and alcohol use disorder (AUD). Mediational effects of adolescent characteristics were explored. This dissertation used Waves I, III, and IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. In Paper 1 (Chapter 3), we investigated the association between multiple types of child maltreatment and adult objective (body mass index; BMI) and subjective (self-rated) obesity, as well as mediating effects by adolescent characteristics including depressive symptoms and BMI. Results showed that after adjusting for sex, race/ethnicity, and maternal education, physical maltreatment was moderately associated with adulthood obesity as measured by BMI and self-reported obesity, while sexual maltreatment was more strongly associated with the objective measure but not the subjective measure. The indirect effects of mediation of adolescent BMI and depressive symptoms were statistically significant. In Paper 2 (Chapter 4), the objective was to examine mediation by adolescent depressive symptoms, alcohol consumption, peer alcohol consumption, and delinquency in the relationship between ADHD symptoms and adult AUD. The indirect effects of mediation of adolescent delinquency, alcohol consumption, and peer alcohol consumption were statistically significant in single and multiple mediator models. In Paper 3 (Chapter 5), the objective was to assess the joint effects of maltreatment/neglect on adult AUD. After adjusting for sex, race/ethnicity, child maltreatment, and parental AUD, ADHD symptoms were significantly associated with increased odds of AUD. There was no strong evidence of multiplicative interaction by maltreatment. This association was stronger for males than females, although the interaction term was not statistically significant. This dissertation adds to the literature by examining relationships between several major public health problems: ADHD symptoms, childhood maltreatment, AUD, depressive symptoms, and obesity. This project has implications for understanding how early life stress increases risk for later physical and mental health problems, and identifying potential intervention targets for adolescents.