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Poster #210 - Effects of Temperament, Attention to Emotions, and Emotion Socialization on Internalizing Problems: An ERP Study

Thu, March 21, 2:15 to 3:30pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Emotion-related parenting styles capture parents’ beliefs about emotions and guide how parents socialize their children’s emotional expression and regulation (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). Mothers’ awareness and coaching of emotions have been indirectly associated with children’s internalizing problems through child negative affectivity, suggesting that parents’ beliefs about emotions and child temperament jointly predict internalizing problems (Brajsa-Zganec, 2014). Cognitive biases toward emotions may also affect observed links between parenting and psychopathology (Gulley, Oppenheimer, & Hankin, 2014). In particular, attention biases to threat moderate associations between temperamental behavioral inhibition (BI) and social withdrawal (Pérez-Edgar et al., 2011). These relations are evident at the neural level. For example, event-related potential (ERP) studies indicate that maltreated children show increased attention to angry faces (Pollak & Tolley-Schell, 2003) and that ERP amplitudes to threatening faces moderate associations between BI and anxiety (Thai, Taber-Thomas, & Pérez-Edgar, 2016). These findings suggest that children growing up in negative home environments, and children with certain temperaments, may experience altered emotion processing at the behavioral, experiential, and neural level. We examined how neural attention allocation to emotional faces and emotion-related parenting styles moderated the relation between child BI and internalizing problems.

Participants were 69 5- to 7-year-old children (36 girls; Mage = 5.58 years; SDage = 0.65; 93% Caucasian) and their primary caregivers. Children completed the dot-probe task to measure neural indicators of attention to emotional faces. ERP analyses used mean amplitudes for frontal N1 and P2, elicited by face pairs. Parents completed the Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire (Bishop, Spence, & McDonald, 2003), the Emotion-Related Parenting Styles short form (Paterson et al., 2012), and the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000).

Multiple regression analyses indicated that the model including child BI, child P2 amplitude to faces, parents’ feelings of ineffectiveness or uncertainty in emotion socialization, and their interactions significantly predicted internalizing problems, F(7,61) = 5.004, p < .001, R2 = .365. There was a significant three-way interaction between BI, P2 amplitude, and feelings of ineffectiveness (B = -0.006, t = -2.047, p = .045; Figure 1). Simple slopes indicated that the interaction between BI and feelings of ineffectiveness was only significant for lower levels of P2 amplitude (-1 SD below mean; b = 0.019, t = 2.145, p = .036). Further, BI was positively related to internalizing when P2 amplitude to faces was low and parents’ feelings of ineffectiveness were high (+1 SD above mean; b = 0.126, t = 3.766, p < .001). These results underscore the importance of integrating research on emotion socialization and neural correlates of emotion processing when examining young children’s adjustment. BI children may be particularly at risk when relatively diminished perceptual processing of emotions is coupled with a parenting environment that may not be adept at dealing with the child’s concerns and fears.

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