Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Neurodegenerative Disease: Pathways to Caregiver Health

PROJECT SUMMARY
Neurodegenerative diseases lead to profound cognitive, emotional, and functional impairments that
leave individuals dependent upon close relational partners who provide care. Although caregiving is a positive
experience for many individuals, providing care for an individual who has socioemotional deficits due to
neurodegenerative disease can lead to adverse consequences for spousal caregivers, including poor mental
and physical health outcomes. However, little research examines the dyadic, interpersonal pathways through
which care recipients’ socioemotional deficits lead to health problems for their caregivers. The current research
focuses on interpersonal emotion regulation – the extent to which a caregiver’s negative emotion is
downregulated and a caregiver’s positive emotion is upregulated during conflict and an acute stressor with
their care recipient – as a potential pathway linking care recipients’ socioemotional deficits to their caregivers’
health problems. The research will compare neurotypicals with individuals who have Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)
and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) to understand how these different disease types
influence interpersonal emotion regulation (Aim 1). The research will delineate the neural, autonomic, and
behavioral correlates of interpersonal emotion regulation (Aim 2), with an emphasis on disease related atrophy,
autonomic, and behavioral factors theorized to subserve interpersonal emotion regulation, including vagal
flexibility, visual attention to other’s emotional expressions, and empathy. Finally, this research will examine
whether poor interpersonal emotion regulation impacts caregiver health longitudinally (Aim 3). To support the
candidate in conducting the proposed research, training is planned in: (a) measurement of changes in
respiratory sinus arrhythmia as an index of vagal flexibility, (b) stationary and mobile eye-tracking technologies
to capture visual attention to emotional stimuli, (c) health psychology and the collection of blood based health
biomarkers, and (d) statistical growth modelling techniques in a structural equation modeling framework. The
research environments within the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the
Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, will be ideal for the proposed training
and research goals, as well as for developing the candidate’s professional skills. Training will occur under the
mentorship of renowned experts in each area of training, and will support the candidates career goal of
transitioning into an independent research career. The proposed research will provide a more nuanced
framework for understanding how socioemotional impairments due to neurodegenerative diseases affect
caregivers’ health over time, and advance our understanding of interpersonal emotion regulation and the
dyadic processes that promote or hinder health in late life.

Grant Number: 5R00AG073617-04
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Casey Brown