(PS6-76) The Impact of Parenting and Callous Unemotional Traits on Child Responses to Caregiver-initiated Affiliative Engagement

Reciprocal affiliative engagement (AE), the mutual pursuit of social and emotional bonds between two individuals, is a crucial dynamic between caregivers and children for child social and emotional development. Parenting and child variables may influence child responsivity to caregiver expressions of AE. Two key variables include parenting behaviors and callous-unemotional (CU) traits, which likely exert independent influences on children’s responses to caregiver expressions of AE. The current study aims to further investigate the relationship between positive and negative parenting practices and child responses to caregiver-initiated AE through an analysis of parent-child interactions in the contexts of love expression and eye-contact based on levels of child CU traits. We hypothesized that negative parenting practices are uniquely associated with lower levels of child-reciprocated AE and positive parenting practices with higher child-reciprocated AE (i.e., eye contact, rates of physical and verbal expressions of affection), controlling for child CU traits, and that CU traits are uniquely associated with lower levels of AE, controlling for parenting behaviors. We also explore whether CU traits attenuate the effects of parenting practices on caregiver-initiated AE. A racially diverse (46.3 % White, 43.8% Black, 6.6% more than one race, 2% Asian) community sample of children (N = 80, M age = 8.89, 66.3 male) and their caregivers (M age = 39.64, 77.5% biological mothers) completed the “I-Love-You” task; in which parents were instructed to play a game while seated adjacent to their child and, when cued, to express love to their child in a way that felt natural to them. Each interaction was video-recorded, and behaviors were coded by three raters (ICC = .78). Additionally, each parent completed the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire-9 (APQ-9) and Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD-P) to measure parenting behaviors and child callous-unemotional traits. Hierarchical linear regression analysis revealed parental initiation of eye contact was uniquely associated with child reciprocated eye contact (B = .545, p < .001), parental initiation of verbal affection was uniquely associated with child reciprocated verbal affection (B = .119, p = .022), and parental initiation of physical affection was uniquely associated with child reciprocated physical affection (B = .337, p < .001). Additionally, the regression analysis revealed an interaction effect of inconsistent discipline and CU traits on child reciprocated physical affection (B = .056, p = .048), though post-hoc simple slope probing using PROCESS revealed no regions of significance. These findings highlight the importance of caregiver-initiated AE on child-reciprocated AE. These findings may also help illuminate unique and potential interactive effects of parenting practices and CU traits on parent-child affiliative interactions and may help inform effective parenting strategies for families of children with CU traits. This study helps address these research gaps, fitting ABCT’s mission to advance scientific approaches to behavioral, cognitive, and biological evidence-based approaches to behavioral health and its commitment to diversity and inclusion.