Poster #203 - Fear Avoidance and Approach as Mediators Between Parent Effortful Control and Child Problem Behaviors.

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, and Reiser (2007) found that parents’ effortful control (EC) influences children’s emotional arousal and problem behaviors. This fits with the general literature that supportive parenting helps children better understand emotions and, in some cases, deal with negative emotions and problem behaviors (e.g., Spinrad et al., 2007). The current study expands upon this work by adding an observed stressful situation and by including both parent- and child-reports of child problem behaviors (CPB). We hypothesized that the negative relationship between parent EC and CPB would be mediated by observed fear such that more parent EC would be related to less fear-avoidance and more fear-approach which would, in turn, be related to lower CPB.
Family triads consisting of two children ages 4-12 (N = 212, 48% female; 86% Caucasian) and one primary caregiver (93% mother) participated in an ongoing study. Parents reported on their EC with items from the attention shifting, activation control, and inhibitory control scales from the Adult Temperament Questionnaire (Evans & Rothbart, 2007). Observational response to a stressful situation was coded from behaviors during the Scary Stranger (SS) task (Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery; Goldsmith, 2001). Principal component analyses with promax rotation of child behavior during SS consistently generated a two-component solution: Fear-Avoidance (facial fear, bodily fear, initial startle, avoidance, negativity, and reversed positivity); and Fear-Approach (vocalization and approach). These composites were moderately correlated with each other [r(152)=.18, p=.03, r2=.03)]. CPB was assessed by both parent-report on the conduct problems subscale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (Goodman, 1997) and by child self-report on the Behavioral Conduct subscale of the Child Self-Perception Profile (Harter, 1999, 2012). See Table 1 for zero-order correlations and descriptives of study variables.
Multilevel modeling results controlling for socioeconomic status, parental age, parental depression, child sex, and child age are presented in Figure 1. There was a significant direct effect of parent EC on CPB across reporter such that higher parent EC correlated with lower CPB. The direct effects of parent EC on the mediators did not change by reporter: higher parent EC related to less fear-avoidance and more fear-approach. The direct effects of the mediators on CPB changed by reporter. Fear-avoidance being significant for child-report of CPB and fear-approach was significant for parent-report of CPB. Both mediators were positively correlated with CPB, with higher scores on the mediator correlating with more CPB. The dual-mediator model resulted in a strengthening of the relation between higher parent EC and lower CPB (effect size=.05) for parent-report but a weakening of the relation (effect size=.03) for child-report.
These results generally fit within Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad’s (1998) heuristic model of the socialization of emotion. The exception to this is the somewhat contradictory finding that fear-approach during the SS was linked to higher parental reports of CPB. Further work will explore whether this is also an indicator of child impulsivity. Parent regulation is an important predictor of CPB, perhaps by way of influencing children’s abilities to regulate fear responses.

Authors

• Sarah Christian, Illinois College
  Presenting Author

• Samantha McFarland, Illinois College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Theah Caitlin Vasquez-O'Brien, Illinois College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Rellinger Zettler, Illinois College
  Non-Presenting Author