Maternal Depressive Symptoms Predict Girls’ but Not Boys’ Emotion Regulation: A Prospective Moment-to-Moment Observation Study

• In Event: Dynamics of Children’s Emotion Regulation and Mother’s Regulatory Strategies in Relation to Maternal and Child Characteristics

Abstract

Background: The development of emotion regulation capacity, especially when encountering the ordinary challenges of everyday life, is one of the essential tasks in early childhood (Cole et al., 2018). Greater emotion regulation capacity in early childhood has far-reaching implications for later adjustment, including better social skills, more successful relationships, and greater psychological well-being (Penela et al., 2015). Emotion regulation is inherently a dynamic process (Cole et al., 2018; Morris et al., 2018). Emerging evidence suggests the importance of dynamic features, such as the sequencing and recurrence of emotional display, in understanding emotion regulation (e.g., Dagne & Snyder, 2011), yet in developmental literature there is a lack of comprehensive theoretical framework to guide research of the temporal dynamics of child emotion regulation. We aimed to further the understanding of maternal depressive symptoms on temporal dynamics of child emotion regulation by applying the process model of emotion regulation to preschoolers and incorporating insights from children’s moment-to-moment emotional expressions.
Methods: Following 108 mother-child dyads from three (T1) to four years old (T2), we asked whether T1 maternal depressive symptoms predicted T2 boys' and girls' faster transitions into and slower transitions out of negative emotion displays when children were frustrated. At T1, mothers completed surveys on demographic information and depressive symptoms. At T2, children participated in a modified version of the Attractive Toy in the Transparent Box task (Lab-TAB; Goldsmith et al., 1995) designed to elicit frustration. Children’s emotional displays during the task were video recorded. The presence of emotions was coded second-by-second with an event-based system. We focused on the two types of negative emotions given their frequent occurrence: anger/frustration and sadness. Expressions of anger included: tight lips, drawn eyebrows, physical aggression (e.g., throwing toys, stamping feet), vocal cues such as yelling and screaming. Examples of expressions coded as sadness included frowning, pouting, droopy eyes, crying, whining, heavy sighing, and hanging the head.
Results: The results from multilevel Cox Regression models showed that child sex moderated the association between maternal depressive symptoms and latencies of sadness (b = -0.07, SE = 0.03, p = .029), but not for anger. In particular, maternal depressive symptoms predicted shorter latencies for girls (but not boys) to express sadness (girls: b = 0.04, SE = 0.02, p = .034; boys: b = -0.02, SE = 0.02, p = .29; see Table 1 and Figure 1).
Conclusions: This study focused on the temporal features of the dynamic emotion regulation processes in a micro-time scale, and studied the antecedent-focused and response-focused emotion regulation among young children using a moment-to-moment observational methodology. We tested the effects of maternal depressive symptoms on boys’ and girls’ regulation of anger and sadness, employing the intensive time-series data of emotional experiences. We found that boys transitioned into anger expressions more quickly than girls. Moreover, girls whose mothers showed higher depressive symptoms transitioned into sadness more quickly than girls with mothers low in depressive symptoms. The findings suggested that girls of mother with elevated depressive symptoms showed impairment in antecedent-focused emotion regulation of sadness.

Authors

• Jia Yan, Utah State University
  Presenting Author

• Xin Feng, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sarah Jane Schoppe-Sullivan, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Micah Gerhardt, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Qiong Wu, Florida State Univeristy
  Non-Presenting Author