Trauma Exposure Related to Mother-Child Emotion Conversation Content and Quality of Mother-Child Interaction

• In Event: 2-134 - Parent-Child Emotion Dialogues in Families Exposed to Violence and Abuse: Associations with Parenting and Child Outcomes

Integrative Statement

Introduction
Parents have a crucial role in helping children understand their inner world and supporting them in emotion regulation (Thompson, 2000;2006). During daily conversations between parents and children, children learn which feelings and reasons for these feelings are acceptable and which are not. Traumatic experiences may impact the quality of parent-child interaction (Visser et al., 2015). Trauma may also impact the topics parents and children choose to talk about. We examined the content of emotion conversations between mothers and children with and without traumatic backgrounds, and related these topics to the quality of their interaction.
Hypotheses
Children with traumatic backgrounds are expected to refer to these traumatic experiences for both positive as well as negative emotions. No specific hypotheses are formulated regarding other content of conversations, but will be exploratively examined.
Study Population
317 mother-child dyads from different samples from Israel and the Netherlands were divided in three ways into two groups: mother traumatized (yes/no), child traumatized (yes/no) and both/none traumatized. Children’s age ranged from 4-18 (Mage=10.0, SDage=2.8), 52.1% of the children were boys, maternal education ranged from 4-25 years (M=14.6, SD=3.7).
Methods
All dyads participated in the AEED (Koren-Karie et al., 2003), a task in which mother and child co-construct four different stories about events in which the child felt happy, scared, angry and sad. Transcripts of dialogues were coded for 1) content of emotion conversation with a newly developed coding system and 2) quality of mother-child interaction, operationalized as mother’s sensitive guidance, child’s cooperation and coherence of conversations.
Results
As expected some differences were found between discussed topics in dyads. For all emotions, trauma (e.g. incidents of parents fighting) was discussed more often when mother, child or both partners had been exposed to trauma. Dyads in which one or two partners had been exposed to trauma seemed less relationship-focused and more object/event-focused (see Table 4.1 & 4.2 for an overview of topics per emotion between groups). Interestingly, the most common topics chosen by dyads to discuss for each emotion were pretty similar in all groups, except for the discussion of trauma for scared in all trauma groups.
Regarding the quality of mother-childinteraction, mothers of dyads in which one or both partners were traumatized were less sensitive in interaction with their children (t(248)=4.75,p<.001), children were less cooperative (t(248)=4.01,p<.001) and their dialogues were less coherent (t(148.3)=3.79,p<.001).
Controlled for child’s age, child’s gender and maternal years of education topics of emotion conversation were regressed on quality of mother-childinteraction. Associations that stood out were the negative association between discussion of the topic ‘trauma’ and maternal sensitive behavior (scared: β=-.13,p=.033; angry:β=-.26,p<.001; sad:β=-.13,p=.049), child cooperation (scared:β=-.13,p=.033; angry: β=-.11,p=.049) and coherence (scared:β=-.13,p=.033), and the positive association between ‘peers’ and child cooperation (scared:β=.13,p=.033; angry:β=.16,p=.024; sad:β=.13,p=.029) and coherence (angry:β=.16,p=.023). ‘No story’ was negatively associated with quality of mother-childinteraction for almost all emotions. These results highlight the importance of dyad’s background on mother’s sensitive guidance of an emotion conversation and of her child’s ability to use her as a secure base while exploring his/her inner world.

Authors

• Mathilde Margaretha Overbeek, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nina Koren-Karie, University of Haifa, School of Social Work
  Non-Presenting Author

• Adi Ben-Haim, University of Haifa, School of Social Work
  Non-Presenting Author

• Carlo Schuengel, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  Presenting Author