Poster #133 - Associations Between Mothers’ Emotion Dysregulation and Real-Time Negative Emotion on Daily Parenting Competence

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Emotion regulation is critical to parenting, as parents need to maintain their own regulated state in order to effectively soothe their distressed children (Rutherford et al., 2015). Continuous experiences of negative emotions and emotion dysregulation may undermine parenting competence, which has important consequences for children by affecting the quality of parent-child interactions and parenting behaviors (Jones & Prinz, 2005). However, little work has examined the influences of parents’ daily emotion experiences on their own perceptions of parenting competence. This study sought to explore how mothers’ self-reported emotion regulation abilities and their real-time reports of negative emotion were related to same-day feelings of parenting competence. Interactions between emotion dysregulation and mothers’ daily negative emotion were also examined.

Data were collected from 142 mothers of toddlers using ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Mothers’ age ranged from 20 to 43 (M = 30.8, SD = 5.0) and their children were between 18 and 27 months (M = 20.9, SD = 2.5). The sample was socioeconomically and ethnically diverse: About 41% of mothers were Hispanic/Latino and about 33% of mothers had less than a college degree. Prior to EMA, mothers completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz & Roemer, 2004), which assessed problems regulating negative emotions. Mothers then completed up to five random surveys per day for 10 days rating experiences of 6 different negative emotions (e.g., sad, frustrated). Aggregated mean scores of negative emotion across each day were obtained. At the end of each day, parents rated their feelings of parenting competence including satisfaction and difficulty (e.g., “How easy/difficult was it to meet your child’s needs today?”). All questions were rated on 5-point scales.

All analyses were conducted using multilevel models. Results indicated that mothers with higher levels of emotion dysregulation reported lower daily parenting competence, B=-0.24, SE=0.09, p=0.013. Similarly, mothers who reported higher overall levels of negative emotion across the study period reported less satisfaction and more difficulty in meeting their child’s needs, B=-0.54, SE=0.13, p<0.001. In addition, within-person effects revealed that on days when mothers reported higher levels of negative emotion compared to their own average, they reported lower parenting competence for that day, B=-0.45, SE=0.09, p<0.001. Between-person interactions revealed that for mothers who reported lower overall levels of negative emotion compared to other mothers, higher emotion dysregulation was related to less parenting competence whereas the effects of emotion dysregulation were not as evident for mothers who reported higher levels of negative emotion (See Figure and Table). Further investigation of discrete negative emotions suggested that anger, frustration, and irritability may be significant in terms of predicting parenting competence by moderating the effect of emotion dysregulation.

These results suggest that mothers’ real-time negative emotion may undermine parents’ abilities to meet their child’s needs, and that emotion regulation abilities may play an important buffering role, particularly for mothers who experience less negative emotion. These findings may shed light on how real-time negative emotion influences the quality of parenting and child outcomes.

Authors

• Ye Rang Park, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

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

• Margaret Lee Kerr, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  Non-Presenting Author