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Abstract
The goal of the present study was to model youth autonomic coordination between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and examine its role in youth psychosocial development. Here, we used pre-adolescent’s (N = 101; Mage = 10.28 years; SDage = 1.19; 50.5% female) sympathetic (via cardiac pre-ejection period) and parasympathetic (via respiratory sinus arrhythmia) activity during a conflict task with a parent to calculate dynamic autonomic coordination and test its associations with adjustment problems. Then, the moderating roles of family cohesion and flexibility in this link were examined. More reciprocal autonomic coordination (i.e., branches demonstrate opposite activity) was found to be a risk factor for later adjustment problems. However, the negative effects of reciprocal ANS coordination were absent in children from high cohesion families. These findings underline the advantage of modeling autonomic nervous system reactivity as the dynamic coordination between its branches as well as the important role of context.