Poster #209 - Predicting Preschool Children’s Emotion Regulation from Child Pleasure and Parental Emotion Coaching

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Emotion regulation has been related to children’s adaptive outcomes in social skills and academic success (Kwon, Kupzyk, & Benton, 2018; Penela, Walker, Degnan, Fox, & Henderson, 2015); therefore understanding conditions that support adaptive emotion regulation is important. Drawing from Fredrickson’s (1998) broaden and build theory, higher levels of positive emotions may contribute to supporting children’s adaptive emotion regulation by helping children build enduring personal resources. Children who display more temperamentally-based positive emotions may have more resources to use when frustrated, thus using more adaptive regulation strategies such as distracting attention away from sources of frustration. Furthermore, if children are frequently exposed to positive emotions in parent-child discussions, they may have models of positive emotion expressivity and opportunities to learn how to manage emotional arousal. Effects of children’s positive emotions on their emotion regulation ability might be more salient when their parents talk with them more about positive emotions; therefore, we examined parental emotion talk about positive emotions as a moderator of the association of child pleasure to emotion regulation. We hypothesized that higher levels of child pleasure would be related to more distraction for children whose parents’ used more positive emotions.
Parents of preschool-aged children (n=153) completed the high intensity child pleasure subscale of the Child Behavior Questionnaire. Children’s emotion regulation was observed in a locked box frustration task, where they were not given the correct key. Distraction was coded in 5-second epochs as present if children were focused on an object other than the locked box for at least 2 seconds. Parental positive emotion was coded when parents referred to their own positive emotion during discussions with children about a time when the child was upset.
A hierarchical regression analysis tested parental positive emotion talk as a moderator of the relation of child pleasure to children’s emotion regulation skills in preschool, controlling for child sex and age (Table 1). The interaction between child pleasure and parental references to own positive emotions was significant. Child pleasure was positively related to children’s emotion regulation skills (Figure 1) for high levels of parental positive emotion talk, slope=.05, p<.05, but not for low levels, slope=-.01, ns.
Results suggest the importance of exploring interactions between children’s temperamental emotional characteristics and parents’ reference to positive emotions, even when discussing an upsetting event with children. The significant interaction supports the broaden and build theory because preschool children displayed more adaptive resources to regulate frustration when both the child and parent were higher in positivity. Parents who focus more on positive emotions may model positivity when discussing a challenging situation and thus may be helping children to build resources that they can use when faced with frustration at other times and in different contexts. It may also be that parents higher in positivity have children higher in positivity through biological connects. The direction of effect is also not known; children who are more likely to use distraction during a task may be better regulated and thus rated higher in pleasure by parents.

Authors

• Eunkyung Shin, Virginia Tech
  Presenting Author

• Cynthia L Smith, Virginia Tech
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kimberly L. Day, University of West Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amy Neal, Virginia Tech
  Non-Presenting Author

• Julie Dunsmore, Virginia Tech
  Non-Presenting Author