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). 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 healthy aging.

Grant Number: 3R00AG073617-04S3
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Casey Brown