Needing to shout to be heard? Caregiver under-responsivity and disconnection between vocal signaling and autonomic arousal in infants from chaotic households

Children raised in chaotic households show affect dysregulation during later childhood. To understand why, we took day-long home recordings using microphones and autonomic monitors from 74 12-month-old infant-caregiver dyads (40% male, 60% white, data collected between 2018 and 2021). Caregivers in low-Confusion Hubbub And Order Scale (chaos) households responded to negative affect infant vocalizations by changing their own arousal and vocalizing in response; but high-chaos caregivers did not, whereas infants in low-chaos households consistently produced clusters of negative vocalizations around peaks in their own arousal, high-chaos infants did not. Their negative vocalizations were less tied to their own underlying arousal. Our data indicate that, in chaotic households, both communicating and responding are atypical: infants are not expressing their levels of arousal, and caregivers are under-responsive to their infants' behavioral signals.