Parents’ beliefs about emotions across early adolescence: Associations with adolescent emotion regulation

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions shape how parents socialize children’s emotions and have been long studied as a contributor to children’s socioemotional adjustment (Gottman et al., 1997; Morris et al., 2017). Research indicates that parents’ beliefs regarding the value and danger of children’s emotions are associated with children’s expressivity, emotion recognition, and emotion regulation in early and middle childhood (Castro et al., 2017; Dunsmore & Karn, 2001; Halberstadt et al., 2008). However, there has been less attention to the impact of parent emotion-related beliefs during adolescence. Because adolescence comes with new emotional challenges and increased expectations for independent emotion regulation (Coe-Odess et al., 2019), it is important to examine how parents’ emotion-related beliefs shift during this time. Furthermore, because emotion regulation is a transdiagnostic process with implications for youth psychosocial adjustment (Aldao et al., 2016), it is important to examine associations of parents’ beliefs about emotions with adolescent emotion regulation. The present study examined longitudinal patterns in parents’ emotion beliefs about emotions across early adolescence, and their association with adolescent emotion regulation. Participants were 87 adolescents ranging from 13-15 years old (50 girls, 27 boys; M age = 14.23 years) and their parent (83.9% mothers, 14.9% fathers, 1.1% grandmothers). Families participated in the spring of eighth grade (n = 87; 50 girls, 37 boys), fall of ninth grade (n = 57; 36 girls, 21 boys), and fall of tenth grade (n = 42; 23 girls, 19 boys). Parents reported their emotion-related beliefs and their child’s emotion regulation on standard questionnaires via postal mail at all three time points. Longitudinal patterns in parent emotion-related beliefs and their association with adolescent emotion regulation were tested with HLM, which uses listwise deletion when running analyses in order to utilize all available data points. Parent and adolescent gender were included as potential moderators. Parents’ value of youth expression of anger was higher in mothers than fathers, and this difference was stable over time. This finding is consistent with the early and middle childhood literature (Garside & Klimes-Dougan, 2002). Over time, parents of daughters endorsed stronger beliefs that positive emotions have costs, whereas this belief weakened over time for parents of sons (Figure 1). This finding may be related to girls’ greater expression of positive emotions than boys’ in adolescence (Chaplin & Aldao, 2013). Over time, parents may become more concerned with dampening girls’ positive emotions over time and enhancing boys’ positive emotions. Finally, increases over time in parents’ belief that youth can control their emotions predicted increases in emotion regulation for boys, but not girls (Figure 2). Notably, adolescent girls’ emotion regulation was higher than boys’ at the 8th grade time point and remained constant over time, with less room to increase. At the 10th grade time point, adolescent boys and girls demonstrated similar levels of emotion regulation. Therefore, the impact of parents’ emotion beliefs may depend on adolescent current emotion regulation abilities. Overall, the present study illustrates that parents’ emotion-related beliefs change over the course of early adolescence and are shaped by parent and youth gender.

Authors

• Rachel Miller-Slough, East Tennessee State University
  Presenting Author

• Julie C Dunsmore, University of Houston
  Non-Presenting Author