Chinese college students’ parental attachment, peer attachment, and prosocial behaviors: The moderating role of respiratory sinus arrhythmia

Highlights

• Both parental and peer attachment were positively associated with college students’ global prosocial behaviors.

• The relationship between peer attachment and college students’ global prosocial behaviors were moderated by their baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA).

• Peer attachment was positively related to the global prosocial behaviors among college students with lower but not higher baseline RSA.

• The relationship between parental attachment and global prosocial behaviors was independent on participants’ baseline RSA.

• Parental and peer attachment and their interaction with baseline RSA have different effects on the submeasures of prosocial behaviors.

Abstract

The goal of this study was to examine whether the links between Chinese college students’ parental attachment, peer attachment, and prosocial behaviors were moderated by a physiological factor—baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). The simplified version of the Inventory of Parental and Peer Attachment (IPPA-R) and the Chinese version of the Prosocial Tendencies Measure (PTM-R) were administered to one hundred forty-four undergraduate students (M = 18.96 years, SD = 1.06 years; 30 % men) to assess parental and peer attachment and prosocial behaviors. Baseline RSA was calculated by electrocardiogram (ECG) data collected during a resting period in the laboratory. The results showed that both parental and peer attachment were positively associated with college students’ global prosocial behaviors. Moreover, peer attachment interacted with baseline RSA to predict college students’ global prosocial behaviors. Specifically, peer attachment was positively related to global prosocial behaviors among college students with low baseline RSA, while peer attachment was not related to global prosocial behaviors among college students with high baseline RSA. In addition, the examination with submeasures of prosocial behaviors revealed that parental and peer attachment and their interaction with baseline RSA have different effects on these different types of prosocial behaviors. The current findings highlight the importance of the consideration of psychosocial factors in conjunction with physiological factors to predict college students’ prosocial behaviors.

Introduction

Prosocial behaviors are voluntary and intentional behaviors that benefit others, such as helping, sharing, cooperating with, and comforting others (Carlo & Randall, 2002; Gross, Stern, Brett, & Cassidy, 2017). Colleges and universities increasingly expect students to engage with the world responsibly and to build prosocial skills (Brandenberger & Bowman, 2015). This is especially true in China, in which social harmony is highly emphasized and college students’ prosocial behaviors are cultivated to enhance their adaptation and social development (Liang, 2015). A large number of previous studies have focused on external environmental factors, such as family environment (Barry, Padilla-Walker, Madsen, & Nelson, 2008), parenting (Day & Padilla-Walker, 2009) and media (Gentile et al., 2009), that affect prosocial behaviors. Of these external factors, college students’ parental and peer attachment may have a critical impact on their prosocial behaviors (Carlo, McGinley, Hayes, & Martinez, 2012; Mattanah, Lopez, & Govern, 2011). Moreover, baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), as a physiological marker of self-regulation, is also implicated in processes related to prosociality (Cui et al., 2015; Hastings & Miller, 2014). However, there is a lack of evidence showing whether and how college students’ parental and peer attachment interacts with baseline RSA to influence their prosocial behaviors. Thus, the present study aimed to examine the interactive effect of college students’ parental and peer attachment and baseline RSA on their prosocial behaviors.

Attachment refers to a close, enduring affectional bond between an infant and caregiver (Bowlby, 1969) or is defined as an enduring affectional bond of substantial intensity (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987). According to attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Bowlby, 1969), human beings are innately equipped with attachment and caregiving behavioral systems. Being emotionally attached to caregivers (e.g., parents) and providing care for dependent or injured individuals (e.g., infants, children, injured family members) during evolution enhanced the chances of survival, reproduction, and successful parenting (Mikulincer, Shaver, Gillath, & Nitzberg, 2005). The function of the attachment system is to protect individuals from danger by ensuring that they maintain proximity to caring and supportive others (attachment figures) who provide support, protection, and relief in times of adversity. Attachment relationships initially begin with between infants and parents, that is, parent attachment, and serve as affective support and a safe base for infants and young children. As development occurs, attachment relationships expand towards peers, and peer attachments serve as sources of emotional support, safe havens, and proximity seeking (Ainsworth, 1989). The quality of attachment relationships or attachment security that children or adolescents experience with both parents and peers has been shown to be significantly related to children’s and adolescents’ social development and adaptation, including prosocial behaviors (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987; Mikulincer et al., 2005).

According to Armsden and Greenberg (1987), attachment security is thought to be fostered through the formation and maintenance of three components: degree of mutual trust, quality of communication, and nonalienation. High-quality attachment security is characterized by good communication, emotional closeness, and trust. Previous studies suggest that high-quality attachment security likely supports individuals’ prosocial behaviors by reducing the needs for self-protection and self-enhancement (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2005), allows a person to shift resources to take the other’s perspective and address others’ needs (Mikulincer, Gillath, & Shaver, 2002) and by instilling a view of others as worthy of care, arouses an altruistic motivation to meet their needs (Gross et al., 2017). In addition, children with high attachment security are better able to regulate emotion (Calkins & Leerkes, 2011; Cassidy, 1994), which can make them calm enough to focus on others’ needs (e.g., Eisenberg & Fabes, 1995) and then supports prosociality. Empirical studies have revealed that adolescents and young adults with high-quality attachments with significant others (both parents and peers), as assessed with the Inventory of Parental and Peer Attachment (IPPA), report being more prosocial (Andretta et al., 2015; Laible, Carlo, & Raffaelli, 2000; Oldfield, Humphrey, & Hebron, 2016; Thompson & Gullone, 2008). Conversely, adolescents and young adults with low-quality attachment with parents and peers tend to hold negative expectations and explanations regarding others, and this may impede their prosocial attitudes and behaviors (Laible et al., 2000; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2015; Oldfield et al., 2016).

Prosocial behaviors emerge in school-aged children and consistently increase through late adulthood (Sze, Gyurak, Goodkind, & Levenson, 2012). During college years, young adults may encounter a number of novel challenges that are crucial for their self and prosocial development (Crocetti et al., 2016; McGinley, 2018), and the attachment bonds with their parents will continue to contribute to these key adjustment processes and outcomes (Mattanah et al., 2011). Moreover, peer attachments increasingly become an important source of emotional support for college students. College students with high levels of peer attachment security have reported high levels of emotional well-being (Love et al., 2009), esteem and confidence (Gloria & Ho, 2003), and decreased depressive symptoms (Ying, Lee, & Tsai, 2010). Furthermore, several studies have found that peer attachment seemed to be more influential in individuals’ prosocial behaviors than parent attachment (Laible et al., 2000; Oldfield et al., 2016). Although parental and peer attachment serve similar functions in an individual’s adaptation, Laible et al. (2000) suggested that peer attachment is more important, especially for prosocial behaviors.

In the Chinese cultural values of family ties and filial piety, the latter outlines the way in which children should interact with their parents (Ho, 1996). The duties associated with filial piety include offering emotional and material support to parents and elders, showing them respect, love, and deference, attending to their needs and complying with their wishes, and showing veneration to ancestors (Yeh, 2003). These are closely related to parental attachment quality, and such an internalized culture value in turn guide people to address interpersonal relationships and behave prosocially outside the family (Chen, 2014). However, little is known about the possible differential roles of parental attachment and peer attachment that contribute to Chinese college students’ prosocial behaviors. Therefore, one aim of the present study was to examine the different effects of parental attachment and peer attachment on college students’ prosocial behaviors in Chinese culture.

Recent research and theory have proposed that parasympathetic nervous system functioning, reflected by activities in the myelinated vagus nerve (i.e., vagal tone), is implicated in processes related to prosociality (Miller, Kahle, & Hastings, 2015; Porges, 2011). As an index of vagal tone, RSA refers to the high-frequency component of heart-rate variability (Eisenberg et al., 2012; Porges, 2007). Baseline RSA or resting RSA reflects the extent of individuals’ flexibility in responding to changes in the internal and external environment, as well as their capacities to maintain physiological homeostasis under normal circumstances (Porges, 2003). It is widely thought to reflect the capacity for physiological self-regulation that underlies effective emotion regulation and social competence (Miller, Kahle, & Hastings, 2017). Higher baseline RSA reflects a greater capacity for parasympathetic top-down modulation of emotional arousal (Song, Colasante, & Malti, 2018), while lower baseline RSA has been characterized as a general marker of stress vulnerability (Campbell, 2019).

Empirical studies have shown that relatively higher baseline RSA is associated with diverse positive adjustments (Beffara, Bret, Vermeulen, & Mermillod, 2016; Eisenberg, 2000; Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010; Taylor, Eisenberg, & Spinrad, 2015), while lower baseline RSA is associated with maladjustment (Beauchain, 2015; Davis, Suveg, Whitehead, Jones, & Shaffer, 2016; El-Sheikh, Arsiwalla, Hinnant, & Erath, 2011). Specifically to prosocial behaviors, studies have suggested that relatively high baseline RSA prompts prosocial behaviors (Beffara et al., 2016; Geisler, Kubiak, Siewert, & Weber, 2013; Graziano & Derefinko, 2013), while low baseline RSA impedes prosocial responses (Eisenberg, 2000; Eisenberg & Eggum, 2009). However, this relationship between resting RSA and prosocial behaviors has not always been supported. Some studies have documented null or even negative associations between baseline RSA and prosociality in children (Eisenberg et al., 1996; Hastings & Miller, 2014).

However, recent studies have characterized the relationship between baseline RSA and prosocial behaviors as quadratic (an inverted U-shaped curve; Clark, Skowron, Giuliano, & Fisher, 2016; Miller, 2017; Miller et al., 2017). The findings suggest that both excessively low and high baseline RSA are harmful to prosocial behaviors, while a moderate baseline RSA is optimal for engaging in prosocial behaviors. Several studies have verified the quadratic link between baseline RSA and prosocial behaviors in children (Acland, Colasante, & Malti, 2019; Miller et al., 2017; Zhang & Wang, 2019) and adults (Kogan et al., 2014). Therefore, the association between baseline RSA and prosocial behaviors is complex and needs to be examined further.

The association between environmental factors and prosocial behaviors might partly be affected by other variables, such as baseline RSA. In other words, baseline RSA might interact with environmental factors to contribute to prosocial behaviors. The diathesis-stress framework (Monroe & Simons, 1991; Zuckerman, 1999) suggests that some individuals are disproportionately or even exclusively likely to be negatively affected by environmental stressors due to a “vulnerability” characteristic. Related to but distinct from the diathesis–stress model, vantage sensitivity models suggest that some individuals are more positively responsive to the environmental advantages to which they are exposed (Pluess & Belsky, 2013). In contrast, according to the differential susceptibility hypothesis (Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Ellis, Boyce, Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2011), individual differences in developmental plasticity (including reactivity) and susceptibility to environments may result in some people being more affected than others by not only negative but also positive contexts. These theoretical models have promoted significant advances in our understanding of the processes through which individual differences moderate the links between environmental factors and the adaptation outcomes (Wagner, Mills-Koonce, Willoughby, Cox, & Family Life Project Key Investigators, 2019).

Baseline RSA, as noted previously, represents the resting parasympathetic influence on cardiac activity via the vagus nerve, which is a stable indicator of individuals’ physiological self-regulation to maintain internal homeostasis in a resting state (Butler, Wilhelm, & Gross, 2006; Geisler et al., 2013; Segerstrom & Nes, 2007; Thayer & Lane, 2009). Numerous studies have examined the moderating role of baseline RSA in the relationships between environmental factors and individuals’ diverse adaptation outcomes (Butler et al., 2006; Eisenberg et al., 2012; El-Sheikh, Keiley, Erath, & Dyer, 2013; Holochwost, Volpe, Gueron‐Sela, Propper, & Mills‐Koonce, 2018). Empirical evidence suggests that low baseline RSA is a vulnerability factor that causes individuals to suffer more under adverse environments and that high baseline RSA buffers the negative effect of the adverse environment due to the better capacity of self-regulation of individuals with high baseline RSA (El-Sheikh, Harger, & Whitson, 2001; Hinnant, Erath, & El-Sheikh, 2015; Holochwost et al., 2018; Katz & Gottman, 1997; Mezulis, Crystal, Ahles, & Crowell, 2015). Moreover, empirical evidence has suggested that low baseline RSA reflects greater susceptibility or sensitivity to environmental influence, which makes individuals more vulnerable to adverse environments and more likely to benefit from positive environmental influences (e.g., El-Sheikh, 2005; El-Sheikh et al., 2001; Gordis, Feres, Olezeski, Rabkin, & Trickett, 2010; Hinnant & El-Sheikh, 2009). However, there is some empirical support for the view that high baseline RSA reflects greater susceptibility or sensitivity to environmental influence; that is, children with high baseline RSA are more susceptible or sensitive to environmental influence (Beauchaine, 2001; Eisenberg et al., 2012).

Recently, Van der Graaff et al. (2016) found that negative environments (higher negative interaction with parents and lower parental support) interact with baseline RSA to contribute to empathic concern, which is believed to facilitate prosocial behaviors (Hoffman, 2000), with negative environments predicting lower empathic concern for adolescents with high baseline RSA, while the association was reversed or not significant for adolescents with low baseline RSA. This finding suggested that high baseline RSA might be considered a susceptible or sensitive factor in the associations between attachment and prosocial behaviors. Therefore, more studies are needed to ascertain whether low or high baseline RSA should be considered a sensitive (vulnerable or susceptible) factor in the associations between attachment and prosocial behaviors. Thus, the aims of the present study were to examine the moderating role of baseline RSA in the link between parental attachment/peer attachment and Chinese college students’ prosocial behaviors, seek whether low or high baseline RSA was sensitive to contextual factors (i.e., parental and peer attachment) and demonstrate which model (e.g., diathesis-stress, differential susceptibility and vantage sensitivity model) would be supported.

Additionally, researchers have suggested that prosocial behaviors are a multidimensional construct (Hastings & Miller, 2014). Carlo and Randall (2002) proposed six forms of prosocial behaviors that are common among adolescents and young adults: emotional, dire, compliant, anonymous, public, and altruistic. Emotional prosocial behaviors are helping behaviors expressed in emotionally evocative situations, such as comforting another. Dire prosocial behaviors refer to helping in crisis situations. Compliant prosocial behaviors include helping when others ask for help. Anonymous prosocial behaviors include helping without the knowledge of others, such as donating time or resources. Public prosocial behaviors are helping behaviors performed in the presence of others. Finally, altruistic prosocial behaviors include helping with little to no expected benefit to self (Carlo & Randall, 2002). Research has consistently yielded evidence that these forms of helping are distinct and somewhat related constructs (see McGinley, Opal, Richaud, & Mesurado, 2014). Therefore, whether attachment including parental and peer attachment, baseline RSA were deferentially related to these specific forms of prosocial behaviors and how baseline RSA plays a moderating role in relationships between attachment including parental/peer attachment and the specific forms of prosocial behaviors were also investigated in the present study.

In summary, the present study examined the moderating role of baseline RSA in the link between parental attachment/peer attachment and Chinese college students’ prosocial behaviors (Fig. 1). Specifically, we hypothesized that (a) both parental and peer attachment would be positively related to college students’ global prosocial behaviors and prosocial behaviors in each dimension and (b) baseline RSA would moderate the link between college students’ parental attachment/peer attachment, global prosocial behaviors and prosocial behaviors in each dimension. Specifically, we expected participants with low baseline RSA to report less prosocial behaviors when attachment quality is poor and more prosocial behaviors when attachment quality is good. That is, people with low baseline RSA are sensitive to contextual factors.