Poster #202 - Child and Parent Predictors of Maternal Emotion Socialization in Late Childhood

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

The foundational model of Eisenberg and colleagues (1998) established that both children and parents shape parental responses to children’s negative emotions in complex ways. While parents clearly have an enduring influence on the development of children, their relationship is dynamic, and both children and parents contribute to it in impactful ways. For example, children make a multidimensional contribution to the relationship through their complex profile of temperamental traits. In addition, parents actively interpret and create knowledge structures regarding children’s behaviors and traits via parental attributions. The purpose of this investigation was to examine children’s temperamental traits (i.e., negative emotionality, soothability, attention focusing, and inhibitory control) and mothers’ attributions for children’s dysregulated negative emotion displays as predictors of mothers’ emotion socialization responses to these same emotions.

The final sample included 123 mother-child dyads (M mother age = 38.74 years; M child age = 10.72 years). Mothers reported on their child’s temperament and their attributions of children’s dysregulated negative emotion displays, including anger, fear, sadness, and shame. Children reported on their mothers’ supportive and nonsupportive emotion socialization responses to negative emotions. Standard multiple regression and bootstrapping were used to examine the relations between children’s temperament, parental attributions of dysregulated negative emotions, and parental emotion socialization responses to these negative emotions.

Both child temperament and parental attributions were associated with maternal nonsupportive responses to specific negative emotions. For sadness, anger, and shame, negative emotionality was related to more internal attributions, whereas soothability, attention focusing, and inhibitory control were related to more external attributions for these same emotions. For fear, attention focusing and inhibitory control only were related to more external attributions. In addition, across all emotions, maternal external attributions were related to less nonsupportive emotion socialization responses to all child emotions, with a single exception.

For maternal supportive responses, the only significant findings were for anger. Negative emotionality was related to more internal attributions of anger, and the remaining temperamental traits were related to more external attributions of anger. In addition, more external attributions for anger were positively related to supportive emotion socialization responses to anger for the negative emotionality and attention focusing models.

Taken together, these findings have important implications for the well-being of the parent-child relationship and children’s emotional competence. This work adds to the literature in this area by identifying underlying factors that underpin parental emotion socialization responses to specific emotions.

Authors

• Katie Elizabeth Rasmussen, West Virginia University
  Presenting Author

• Amy Root, West Virginia University
  Non-Presenting Author