An important aspect of this idea is that co-regulation cannot be reduced down to the behaviors or experiences of the individuals involved in the interaction.
This scenario exemplifies a mother maintaining her infant's engagement via variations in her voice, facial expressions, and body language.
Likewise, the infant indicates and maintains the mutual engagement with her own facial expressions, vocalizations, and body language.
[The infant exhibits a big smile with bobbing head, and mother responds in kind, then says,] Oh, well now, are you gonna say somethin'?
[4] The basic premise is that early biological and behavioral co-regulation from the caregiver facilitates the child's development of secure attachment which then promotes self-regulation.
Alternatively, Bowlby hypothesized that infants who experience insensitive and inconsistent caregiving are likely to develop the expectation that emotional needs will not be met by others or the self.
[6] Furthermore, in studies testing the statistical dependencies between parent and infant behaviors, researchers have found support for contingencies of eye gaze, facial expressions, prosody, speech rhythms, attention, and physiological arousal.
As such, it works from the hypothesis that early experiences of co-regulation are internalized and guide expectations about, and behavior within, future close relationships.
First, co-regulation in adult relationships is defined by reciprocity between partners, such that the responsibility to regulate the other is more or less equally split.
Indeed, physiological substrates involved in reward systems (e.g., oxytocin, opioids), are strongly activated by sexual contact, which is an added mechanism through which adults co-regulate.
So far, researchers have evidence that adult partners' emotions oscillate in a coordinated pattern[10] and that presence of one's spouse leads to stress reduction, and even more so for individuals in reportedly high quality marriages.
More rapidly fluctuating indices, such as autonomic responses, for example, are proposed to be more temporally sensitive measures of biological co-regulation.
[1] As co-regulation is contingent on reciprocal relationships between members of a dyad, it can be compromised by risk factors within the individuals.
As such, a newer line of research has identified children on the autism spectrum as a risk group for disruptions in co-regulation in their parent-child dyads.
The authors conjectured that this continuation was a reflection of the mothers' sensitivity to their children's heightened developmental needs.