Poster #145 - Rethinking the Ideal: Exploring Emotion Socialization in a Cultural and Relational Context

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Research on emotion socialization provides a promising direction for studying how caregivers can promote healthy development in young children who have experienced significant adversity. Most of this work, however, has involved community samples of White, middle-class families, and little attention has been paid to the cultural context in which emotion socialization occurs. The possibility that different kinds of emotional socialization practices may be adaptive in different cultural or ethnic groups is suggested by the findings that African American parents exhibit more punitive and minimizing responses to their children’s unpleasant emotions than do European American parents (Nelson, Leerkes, O’Brien, Calkins, & Marcovitch, 2012), but that these responses predict more adaptive outcomes, such as lower levels of aggression, in African American families (Labella, 2017). These findings suggest that emotion socialization strategies identified as optimal in middle- and upper-class White families may not be the only adaptive strategies across cultural, relational, or socioeconomic contexts. The goal of the current study was to explore whether emotion socialization strategies studied in predominantly White samples are related to adaptive functioning in a predominantly African American sample. We examined these strategies within the broader context of the parent-child relationship, testing whether the nature of associations between specific behaviors and child functioning is moderated by parental warmth.

Families (N=124 dyads) were recruited at Head Start preschools in a Midwestern city (Mage=4; 53% male; 93% African American). Preschoolers and their caregivers engaged in a video-recorded interaction (Shipman & Zeman, 1999) in which they discussed children’s emotional experiences. Caregivers’ responses were coded with the Validation/Invalidation Behavior Coding Scales, which include specific behaviors that are categorized as either invalidating (e.g., changing the subject, teaching, minimizing) or validating (coaching, listening) (Shipman, Fitzgerald, & Torres, 2015). Caregivers also reported on their global warmth and supportiveness. Teachers completed measures of preschoolers’ functioning across multiple domains (emotion regulation, social competence, school readiness, internalizing/externalizing behaviors), which were combined to create a multifaceted composite of adaptive functioning. Correlational analyses first were conducted, which showed no significant associations between the specific behaviors and the resilience composite. Next, we examined if specific responses to children’s emotions (e.g., changing the subject) interacted with parental warmth to predict the resilience composite. After accounting for child sex and age as covariates, two significant interactions emerged. Parental warmth interacted with subject shift to predict adaptive functioning (β=.25, p<.01; Figure 1); simple slope analyses showed that changing the subject was negatively associated with resilience at low levels of warmth (β=-.28) and positively related at high levels of warmth (β=.10). Parental warmth also interacted with teaching (β=.22, p<.05; Figure 2); teaching was negatively associated with resilience at low levels of warmth (β=-.13) and positively related at high levels of warmth (β=.12). These findings show that certain emotion socialization strategies labeled as “invalidating” in research with predominantly White, middle-class families were not related to poorer adjustment in low income African American families when they were expressed by warm and supportive parents. This study underscores the importance of considering the broader context in which emotion socialization occurs.

Authors

• Kristen Yule, Marquette University
  Presenting Author

• Mara Makasiar, Marquette University
  Non-Presenting Author

• John Grych, Marquette University
  Non-Presenting Author