Poster #214 - Preschoolers’ Socioemotional Adjustment: The Role of Emotion Coaching and Emotion Regulation

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Early childhood is a critical period for the development of self-regulatory systems. Research on emotion socialization show that caregivers have a fundamental role in developing children’s emotion regulation skills through their awareness and willingness to talk about pleasant and unpleasant emotions, as well as guidance on how to manage different emotional experiences (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1997). These emotion coaching behaviors have shown to predict better emotion regulation (Ellis, Allisic, Reiss, Dishion, & Fisher, 2014) and to buffer against behavioral problems (Katz & Windecker-Nelson, 2006) in preschoolers exposed to adversity. Children’s emotion regulation abilities also have shown to mediate the association between parental socialization of emotions and symptoms of psychopathology in elementary school children exposed to intimate partner violence (Katz, Stettler, & Gurtovenko, 2016). These findings suggest that children’s growing ability to manage their emotional reactions fosters a greater ability to regulate affect and inhibit undesirable behavior, which in turn may foster more positive peer interactions and a greater attentional abilities in school. However, the potential for emotion regulation to act as a mechanism through which emotion coaching can foster healthy development rarely has been investigated. The current study used a multi-informant design to test whether preschoolers’ emotion regulation abilities mediate the association between emotion coaching behaviors and three socioemotional milestones expected to be mastered during early childhood (school readiness, social competence, low symptomatology).

Families (N=124 dyads) were recruited at Head Start preschools in a Midwestern city (Mage=4; 53% male; 93% African American). Caregivers reported on their use of emotion coaching strategies, as well as their preschoolers emotion regulation. Teachers and caregivers completed measures of preschoolers’ socioemotional adjustment across three domains (school readiness, social competence, internalizing/externalizing symptoms); teacher and caregiver reports were combined. Correlational analyses first were conducted, which demonstrated positive associations between emotion coaching, emotion regulation, social competence, and school readiness (rs from .32 to .75), which were all associated with fewer internalizing/externalizing symptoms (rs from -.19 to -.62). Next, we analyzed three mediation models to test whether children’s emotion regulation abilities mediate associations between emotion coaching and each of the three domains of adjustment. Tests of indirect effects were conducted by taking 5000 bootstrap samples to estimate the size and significance of the indirect effect (Hayes, 2013). As shown in Figure 1, results indicated significant direct effects of emotion coaching on emotion regulation (b=.99, p=.001), and emotion regulation on each outcome variable (school readiness, b=.05, p=.001; social competence, b=.05, p=.001; symptomatology, b=-.11, p=.001). Emotion coaching demonstrated significant indirect effects through emotion regulation on school readiness (ab=.05), social competence (ab=.05), and internalizing/externalizing symptoms (ab=-.12). Results of the full model showed the direct effects of emotion coaching on school readiness (c′=.13, p=.01) and social competence (c′=.08, p=.04) remained significant when accounting for emotion regulation as a mediator, whereas emotion coaching on internalizing/externalizing symptoms did not show a direct effect (c′=.03, p=.32). These findings suggest that emotion regulation is a mechanism through which caregivers’ emotion coaching fosters children’s ability to establish healthy peer relationships, early academic success, and fewer behavioral problems.

Authors

• Kristen Yule, Marquette University
  Presenting Author

• Christina Caiozzo, Marquette University
  Non-Presenting Author

• John Grych, Marquette University
  Non-Presenting Author