Poster #135 - Emotion Dysregulation, Mother-Child Relationship Quality, and Oppositional Defiant Symptoms among Chinese Children

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), a type of emotional and behavioral disorder characterized by a recurrent pattern of angry/irritable, argumentative/defiant, and vindictive behavior toward authority figures, is one of the most commonly-occurring disorders in young children (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). The core characteristic is deficit of emotion regulation (i.e., emotion dysregulation) (Cavanagh, et al., 2017). This study examined whether and how mothers’ and children’s perceptions of the mother-child relationship quality mediate the longitudinal associations between mothers’ and children’s initial emotion dysregulation and children’s later emotion dysregulation and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) symptoms. Participants were 123 Chinese children with ODD and their mothers from a three-wave (2 years apart) longitudinal study. Multiple informant approach was used: ODD symptoms and child emotion dysregulation were reported by mother and teacher, mother-child relationship quality by mother and child, maternal emotion dysregulation by self. Dyadic analysis approaches, including the actor-partner interdependent model (APIM; Kenny, et al., 2006) and the common fate model (CFM; Ledermann & Kenny, 2012), were employed. Results (see Figure 1) revealed that (1) mothers’ emotion dysregulation significantly related to their own concurrent perceptions of relationship quality, whereas children’s wave 1 emotion dysregulation significantly related to their own and mothers’ perceptions of relationship quality at wave 1; (2) mothers and children perceptions of relationship quality from wave 1 to wave 2 were stable but also interdependent such that ones’ wave 1 perception of relationship quality significantly influenced the other’s wave 2 perception; more importantly, (3) relationship quality mediated the longitudinal associations between mothers’ and children’s wave 1 emotion dysregulation and children’s wave 3 emotion dysregulation and ODD symptoms in an interdependent pattern. A major strength is that based on multi-informant approach, i.e., mothers’, children’s, and teachers’ reports, in this study we employed a hybrid model incorporating APIM and CFM. APIM allowed simultaneously examining the actor effects and the partner effects between mothers’ and children’s emotion dysregulation and perceptions of relationship quality, while CFM partitioned variance shared across reporters from variance that is unique to mother and teacher reports. A second strength is that a two-year (three waves) longitudinal data of Chinese children diagnosed with ODD was used, which provided us a critical opportunity to explore the mediating roles of the mother-child relationship quality in the associations from mothers’ children’s initial emotion dysregulation to children’s later emotion dysregulation and ODD symptoms in contemporary Chinese families. Although with some limitations, these findings have implications for family intervention targeting maternal emotion dysregulation and strengthening mothers’ and children’s subjective perceptions of the mother-child relationship quality for children with ODD.

Authors

• Yongqiang Jiang, Beijing Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Xiuyun Lin, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author