Poster #214 - Parents and Teachers as Emotion Socializers: Cross-context and Cross-domain Interactive Effects on Children’s Emotion Regulation

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Children learn how to regulate emotions through caregivers’ responses to children’s emotions and modeling of emotional expression and regulation (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998; Klimes-Dougan & Zeman, 2007). Caregivers’ unsupportive responses to children’s emotions likely fail to promote emotional competence in children (Denham, Mitchell-Copeland, Strandberg, Auerbach, & Blair, 1997; Fabes, Poulin, Eisenberg, & Madden-Derdich, 2002); similarly, caregivers’ negative emotional expressivity (NE) also may undermine children’s developing emotional competence (Fabes et al., 2002; Garner, 1995). Importantly, messages sent through one emotion socialization (ES) domain may interact with messages sent through other domains; for example, caregiver NE may amplify the deleterious effects of their unsupportive responses (Fabes, Leonard, Kupanoff, & Martin, 2001; Mirabile, 2014). Unfortunately, the question of whether or how various ES domains interact has received scant empirical attention, even less so considering ES messages across multiple contexts (e.g., home and school). Considering all secondary caregivers, not just teachers, the limited research addressing multiple-socializer interactive effects supports a buffering model: more supportive caregiving outside the home compensates for poor parental ES (McElwain, Halberstadt, & Volling, 2007; Vesely, Brown, Levine, & Mahatmya, 2013). Though this work broadly addresses children’s emotional competence, it does not address children’s emotion regulation (ER) specifically; nor does it address the effects of unsupportive ES across contexts.

The present study explores whether parents’ and teachers’ unsupportive responses and NE interact in predicting children’s ER. Following McElwain et al. (2007) and Mirabile (2014), we hypothesized that high levels of one socializer’s NE amplify the negative effect of the other socializer’s unsupportive ES on children’s ER.

Parents (n = 102; M age = 32.9 years; 81% mothers) of 5-9-year-old children (52% male) and children’s teachers (n = 29; 93% female; M age = 39.4 years) participated. Parents and teachers reported on their NE (Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire; Halberstadt, Cassidy, Stifter, Parke, & Fox, 1995), their responses to children’s negative emotions (Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale; Fabes, Eisenberg, & Bernzweig, 1990), and children’s ER (Emotion Regulation Skills Questionnaire; Mirabile, 2014).

Interactive effects of parents’ and teachers’ unsupportive ES and NE on children’s ER were tested using hierarchical multiple regressions, once with parent unsupportive ES as the predictor and teacher NE as the moderator and once with teacher unsupportive ES as the predictor and parent NE as the moderator.

Teacher unsupportive ES related positively to child maladaptive ER only at high levels of parent NE, suggesting that high parent NE may amplify the effect of teacher unsupportive ES on child maladaptive ER (Figure 1). Parent unsupportive ES related positively to child maladaptive ER, but this relationship weakened to non-significance at high levels of teacher NE (Figure 2). Rather than amplify the relationship, high levels of teacher NE may buffer against the effects of parent unsupportive ES, possibly via teachers’ using NE to signal to school-age children that better ER is expected (see Denham, 2007). Alternately, these findings may be child-driven or bi-directional, suggesting the necessity of longitudinal research to clarify the complex interactions among parents’ and teachers’ ES behaviors.

Authors

• Scott Paul Mirabile, St. Mary's College of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Benjamin Ertman, St. Mary's College of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author