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Poster #214 - Mother emotion dysregulation predicts child negative emotionality through emotion socialization and child regulation behaviors

Fri, March 22, 12:45 to 2:00pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Recent studies and empirical theory suggest that parents’ abilities to regulate emotions may impact their children’s emotional development, including their emotion regulation (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Morelen et al., 2016). However, research is needed to confirm this transmission and examine how it may operate indirectly across time. Parents’ responses to their children’s emotions may derive from their emotion regulation skills (Buckholdt et al., 2014) and are robustly related to children’s own emotion regulation abilities (Thompson & Meyer, 2007), thus potentially functioning as a mediator in this relation. Furthermore, children’s early attempts to regulate their emotions via attention-focused behaviors may also be influenced by parents’ emotion regulation and emotion socialization, while representing a stepping stone to children’s later trait-level indices of regulation. As such, the current study employs a three-data-wave design to examine how mothers’ emotion dysregulation may predict their emotion socialization practices and children’s regulatory behaviors, which may then in turn serially relate to children’s negative emotionality.

Participants were 189 mothers who participated with their toddlers (56.3% boys) at three time-points. At T1 (child Mage = 26.74 months), mothers completed The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004) to report on their emotion dysregulation. At T2 (child Mage = 38.88 months), mothers responded to The Coping with Toddlers’ Negative Emotions Scale (Spinrad et al., 2004) to provide a measure of how often they responded to their children’s emotions with expressive encouragement or matched distress. Also at T2, mother-child dyads participated in a low-threat (clown) novelty episode, and observed attention-focused regulation behaviors (i.e., proportionalized duration of brief and sustained looks away from stimulus) were coded, similarly to previous studies (Buss & Goldsmith, 1998). At T3 (child Mage = 51.29 months), mothers reported on their toddlers’ negative emotionality via the Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (Carter et al., 2001).

Missing data was handled using expectation-maximum imputation. Two serial mediation models were computed using the PROCESS macro for SPSS (Hayes, 2013), with 10,000 bootstrap CIs and while covarying for the other emotion socialization response. For the model with mothers’ expressive encouragement, there was a significant overall indirect effect (95% CI [.0028, .0302]), as well as one with mother emotion dysregulation predicting children’s negative emotionality through children’s frequent regulation behaviors (95% CI [.0069, .1401]). Specifically, mothers’ greater emotion dysregulation predicted more child negative emotionality through less expressive encouragement and more attention-focused regulation. For the model with mothers’ distress responses, the serial mediation was not significant; however, there were two significant indirect effects, including the supplementary indirect effect of the first model. Additionally, mothers’ emotion dysregulation predicted children’s negative emotionality through distress responses (95% CI [-.1445, -.0045]), such that greater maternal emotion dysregulation predicted more distress reactions, which in turn predicted less negative emotionality. These findings suggest that mothers’ emotion regulation abilities and emotion socialization responses may be pertinent to children’s later emotion regulation behaviors and traits, via both positive and negative pathways.

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