Associations Between Maternal Global Emotionality, Parenting-Specific Emotionality, and Sensitivity During Early Infancy

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Sensitive caregiving, particularly during infancy, is essential for children’s adaptive social and emotional development. Thus, determining predictors of sensitive caregiving is important. Maternal characteristics, like global emotionality, have been demonstrated to be a predictor of sensitive caregiving, such that mothers lower in negative emotionality are higher in sensitivity (Leerkes et al., 2004). Motivations of emotion, or the source of emotion, during the parenting context may be a mechanism of transmission for global emotionality to parenting behaviors (e.g., Leerkes & Augustine, 2019). Motivations of parenting-specific emotions have been classified as being either mother-oriented (e.g., mothers’ focus on own feelings during infant distress) or infant-oriented (e.g., mothers’ focus on infants’ feelings and needs during infant distress; Dix, 1991; Leerkes & Augustine, 2019). In the current study, we examined the extent to which maternal global emotionality predicted maternal parenting-specific emotionality, which in turn predicted sensitive and responsive caregiving. Further, in the current study, we were interested in the moderating role of infant negative emotionality, based on the idea that maternal emotional reaction to infant crying may be more strongly associated with parenting if infants are more distressed during the interaction.

Participants included 259 primiparous mother-infant dyads (50% European-American, 50% African American; infants 51% female). During the third trimester, mothers completed the Differential Emotions Scale to assess global positive and negative emotionality (Izard et al., 1993). When infants were 6-months, mothers completed the My Emotions Questionnaire (Leerkes & Qu, 2020) to assess mother-oriented (anger, anxiety) and infant-oriented parenting-specific emotion (empathy and sympathy for the baby) when infants cry. When infants were 14-months, mothers completed the Coping with Toddlers Negative Emotions Scale (Spinrad et al., 2004) to assess supportive and non-supportive emotion socialization. Dyads also participated in distress eliciting tasks from which infant distress and maternal sensitivity were coded.

As illustrated in Figure 1, maternal global positive emotionality was positively associated with infant oriented emotions, which was in turn associated with increased sensitivity, an effect that was stronger when infants displayed low versus high negative affect during the interaction (see Figure 2). There was a significant direct negative effect of maternal global negative emotionality on sensitivity. Although global negativity predicted higher mother-oriented emotional reactions to crying, the latter was not associated with sensitivity, and hence not a viable mediator.

Results are consistent with the view that global emotionality and parenting-specific emotions predict parenting, although the pathways varied for positive (indirect) and negative emotionality (direct). Research in this area has predominately focused on mothers’ negative emotionality, and results from this study suggest that maternal positive emotions may be important also. However, the pathway from mothers’ positive emotions to enhanced sensitivity was weaker when infants displayed more distress, underscoring the role infant behavior plays in caregiving.

Authors

• Lauren Bailes, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Esther M. Leerkes, UNC Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author