Poster #200 - Adaptation of a Measure for Parental Emotion Socialization in Early Adolescence

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Adaptive emotion regulation is an important developmental achievement linked to children’s social and academic success. The way parents socialize children’s negative emotions provides a context for the development of children’s emotion regulation (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Murphy, 1996). Six parent emotion socialization (ES) strategies have been identified, and they have been examined primarily with questionnaire rating scales filled out by parents of young children (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 1996). Developmental changes in late childhood and early adolescence can influence parental expectations for children’s emotion regulation and thus new strategies might emerge. The present studies sought to explore the full range of ES strategies used by parents of early adolescents. We gathered parents’ open-ended reports of ES, and then used this information to adapt an established measure of ES to include a fuller range of parent responses that would be better suited for parents of older children.

For the first study, 171 parents of children 9-14 years completed items adapted from the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES; Fabes, Eisenberg, & Bernzwig, 1990). The original measure provides parents with scenarios in which a child has experienced an upsetting event and a specific negative emotion, and parents rate their use of six strategies. In our open-ended modification, we gave four of the scenarios— selected as they varied in whether the child had control over the upsetting event and whether the focus of the event was social or nonsocial— with parent responses coded by trained raters. We identified nine ES strategies (see Table 1), which included six previously established ES techniques as well as three new approaches: (a) self-regulation, (b) parents seeking information about the situation, and (c) parents helping their child understand the situation (see Table 1). The most commonly used strategies included two studied previously, problem solving and emotion focused strategies, as well as one new strategy, parents helping their child understand the situation. Thus, in addition to directly solving the problem with or for the child, at older ages, parents also equip children to learn emotion regulation strategies by helping them understand or reframe the situation.

In a second study with 114 parents of 9- to 12-year-olds, we wrote additional response options for the original CCNES to test whether parents endorse the three new approaches in a rating scale format. For each of the scenarios, parents were instructed to rate (1 = very unlikely; 7 = very likely) their use of each strategy. Means, intercorrelations, and alphas for all nine ES strategy questionnaire scales are displayed in Table 2. Scales were reliable, and showed some distinctiveness.

Our studies suggest that parents do use some ES strategies not studied with younger children, all of which involve allowing the child to show autonomy or collaborate with the parent. Future research could examine these newly identified ES approaches with a broader age range, as well as validate the adapted questionnaire further by examining how ES strategies are related to other outcomes (e.g., attachment, well-being).

Authors

• Logan B. Kochendorfer, Kent State University
  Presenting Author

• Brittany D. Ahearn, Kent State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer R. Dougherty, Kent State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathryn A. Kerns, Kent State University
  Non-Presenting Author