Associations between Parental Positive Emotion and Pre-Adolescents' Trait-like and State-like Emotion Regulation

• In Event: 1-178 - Focusing on Family Strengths: Understanding Positive Development in a Family Context

Integrative Statement

Emotion regulation (ER) is regarded as a crucial developmental competence, one that is robustly associated with psychopathology, social competence, etc. Decades of research document the role parents play in the development of children’s ER (e.g., Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). Parent-child coregulation, wherein caregivers reflect children’s emotions, is one aspect of parent-child interactions thought to foster children’s ER (Fonagy et al., 2002). Indeed, coregulation is associated with positive outcomes among children, such as children’s better self-regulation of negative affect (Davidov & Grusec, 2006), whereas negative coregulation, such as caregiver invalidation of youth emotion, is associated with maladaptive ER strategies and symptoms of depression (Yap, Allen, & Ladouceur, 2008). The majority of research on coregulation focuses on parent-infant interactions and the down-regulation of negative emotions, despite evidence that coregulation transpires across development (Sbarra & Hazan, 2008) and that positive emotion coregulation, or the up-regulation of positive emotion, also fosters ER in youth (e.g., Denham & Kochanoff, 2002); the current study explores understudied links between positive parental emotions and pre-adolescents’ ER.

Participants included 106 mothers-child dyads (Mage = 39.6, SDage = 7.2; Mage = 10.3, SDage = 1.1, 49.5% female, respectively) from diverse backgrounds (57% non-White; 48% less than $60,000/annually). Participants completed questionnaires, a standardized stressor task, and a semi-structured interview. Verbatim transcripts of child interviews were analyzed linguistically for frequency of positive and negative emotion word use (LIWC; Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001). We examine associations of parents’ positive emotion expression prior to and following a stressor with measures of children’s ER. We hypothesized that parental pre-stressor positive affect (PA) would be associated with children’s more frequent use of adaptive ER strategies (lower rumination, lower emotion suppression, higher reappraisal) and children’s higher positive emotion word use and lower negative emotion word use. In comparison, we expected that parental post-stressor PA would be associated with children’s state-like ER in the form of lower negative emotion word use and higher positive emotion word use following the stressor.

Parent pre-stressor PA was associated with children’s better trait-like and state-like ER. Controlling for children’s trait-like negative affect (parent-reported) and for covariates, mothers’ pre-stressor PA significantly predicted lower child rumination (Table 1; ΔR2 = .04, p = .035) and lower emotion suppression (ΔR2 =.07, p = .005), but not greater cognitive reappraisal (ΔR2 = .006, p = .442). In addition, mothers’ pre-stressor PA significantly predicted children’s higher post-stressor positive emotion word use (Table 2; ΔR2 = .07, p = .012). However, mother’s post-stressor PA did not (ΔR2 = .001, p = .81). Finally, mother’s post-stressor PA was associated with lower child negative emotion word use (ΔR2 = .05, p = .036).

We interpret these results as consistent with prior work on the importance of coregulation and validation of children’s emotions, even in pre-adolescence – with new evidence that mothers’ positive emotion prior to a stressful experience is associated with their children’s positive emotion expression and regulation strategies, while mother’s positive emotion following a stressor is associated with lesser negative emotion expression.

Authors

• Lucas M. Sohn, University of California, Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Patricia A Smiley, Pomona Colege
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hannah F. Rasmussen, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica Borelli, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author