Effectiveness of Maternal Regulatory Attempts on Toddlers’ Negative Affect in US, Turkey, and Romania

• In Event: 2-168 - Maternal Socialization of Toddlers' Self-Regulation: Examination of Moment-to-Moment Dynamics in Diverse Samples

Integrative Statement

Development of emotion regulation skills is a primary developmental task of young children. Caregivers’ vicarious regulation attempts represent one important factor (Friedlmeier, Corapci, & Cole, 2011). Previous studies analyzed effectiveness of maternal regulatory attempts by correlating strategies and child affect (Grolnik et al., 1998). Such overall frequency analyses miss the moment-to-moment mechanisms that may be relevant to understand the dynamics of mother-toddler interactions better.
The main goal of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of maternal strategies on toddlers’ emotion based on contingencies by taking dyadic differences into account. A strategy is effective if it helps the child to down-regulate their negative affect. Following previous research, we expected that distraction and positive feedback (positive emotion, positive statements) may help downregulate, comforting the child physically or verbally may have an ambivalent effect as it could heighten the child’s emotion, and negative reactions like minimization rather increase toddler’s negative emotion. As mother-toddler interactions typically show strong interdyadic variations, we also aimed to explain such differences by taking microlevel (child characteristics) and macrolevel factors (cultural membership, maternal SES) into account.
N = 150 (52 U.S., 40 Romanian, and 58 Turkish) mother-toddler dyads participated in a delay of gratification task. Seventeen maternal strategies and child’s intensity for negative affect (0-no display, 3–strong display) were coded for four minutes in 5-sec intervals. Strategies were grouped into six types: distraction, physical warmth, verbal warmth, positive control (e.g., positive emotion), task-oriented control (e.g., physically refraining the child from getting the reward), and negative control (e.g., minimizing). Contingency variables were computed by determining whether a strategy was followed by a decrease, an increase or no change of child’s negative affect within the next five second interval.
First, we computed chi-square analyses (Buss & Goldsmith, 1998). Results showed that the effectiveness of the strategies was similar across the countries except that physical warmth was not effective within the Romanian dyads. Overall, positive control and maternal warmth (physical and verbal comforting) led to a decrease of toddlers’ negative affect. However, these strategies were also often followed by an increase in child’s negative affect. Distraction did not lead to systematic decrease. A problem of this analysis is the fact that it leaves out the patterns within the dyads.
Going beyond this analysis, we computed a multilevel model with nested effects for the dyads which pointed to strong interindividual variations. Therefore, we calculated contingencies for each dyad whether the strategy was effective. We are now computing logistic regression models to identify micro- and/or macrolevel factors that may explain the individual variations of effectiveness. Preliminary results showed that the effectiveness of the strategies was affected by child’s overall distress (medium vs. high level of negative emotion expression) and timing. For example, verbal comforting is more effective for toddlers who reacted strongly and when it is displayed rather early than late. The effectiveness was rather similar across maternal SES, gender, and country. Currently, we conclude that micro-level characteristics seem to be relevant components when planning parenting interventions to foster toddlers’ regulatory skills.

Authors

• Wolfgang Friedlmeier, Grand Valley State University
  Presenting Author

• Rasmus Grydehoj, Grand Valley State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• FEYZA ÇORAPÇI, BOĞAZİÇİ UNİVERSITY
  Non-Presenting Author

• Georgiana Susa-Erdogan, Babeș-Bolyai University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Oana Benga, Babeș-Bolyai University
  Non-Presenting Author