Maternal Personality Functioning as a Moderator Between Parenting Practices and Adolescent Emotion Suppression

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Emotion regulation (ER) during early childhood involves strategies that rely on inhibitory control, such as children suppressing the expression of emotions, which is considered adaptive (Gross & Cassidy, 2019). As children mature, however, using emotion suppression (ES) to regulate emotions becomes maladaptive, being linked to negative outcomes such as social anxiety disorder and low levels of well-being (Dryman & Heimberg, 2018; Gross & John, 2003). Maternal ES and parenting practices are routinely linked to greater ES use among older children and adolescents (Gunzenhauser et al., 2014). Negative maternal personality traits are also linked to greater ER difficulties among children, positive personality is linked to positive parenting in adolescence, and maternal psychopathology is associated with unsupportive reactions (Breaux et al., 2016; Kiel et al., 2017). Maternal personality and parenting research related to ER development is limited, focusing on narrow domains of personality like personality disorders rather than assessing personality more broadly, such as personality health. Recent research suggests that assessing overall personality health may be more informative, with this work associating a healthy personality with a positive personality (Bleidorn et al., 2020). With this in mind, we used the Levels of Personality Functioning Scale-Short Form (LPFS-SF; Hutsebaut et al., 2015) to examine overall maternal personality health in a non-clinical sample. Higher scores indicate higher dysfunction, but not necessarily pathology. We examined parenting practices and broader domains of maternal personality as predictors of adolescent ES.
We hypothesized that that maternal unsupportive reactions to negative emotions would predict greater ES among adolescents, with maternal personality moderating this relationship. One hundred mothers and their adolescents (M = 14.72, SD = 1.94) participated. Adolescents self-reported on ES (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003) and mothers self-reported unsupportive reactions to adolescents’ negative emotions (CCNES modified for adolescents; Shortt et al., 2016) and their own personality via broader personality domains measured by LPFS-SF: interpersonal (intimacy and empathy) and intrapersonal (identity and self-direction).
We used PROCESS (Hayes, 2018) to run separate models using intrapersonal and interpersonal maternal personality as the moderator of maternal unsupportive reactions predicting adolescent ES. The model with interpersonal functioning was significant [F(3,96) = 3.15, p < .05, R2 = .09], but the interaction with unsupportive reactions was not (p = .55). The model with intrapersonal functioning was significant [F(3,96) = 3.10, p < .05, R2 = .09], as was the interaction between intrapersonal functioning and unsupportive reactions (β = .36; t = 2.16, p < .05). Simple slopes analysis at one SD above and below the mean for intrapersonal functioning showed the association was only significant when mothers showed better intrapersonal functioning (p < .01). If mothers with better intrapersonal functioning (lower scores represent better functioning) also showed low unsupportive reactions to their adolescent’s negative emotions, then adolescents professed to using less ES. However, if these better intrapersonal functioning mothers reported high unsupportive reactions, their teens professed to using more ES. Thus, maternal intrapersonal personality functioning combined with little tendency to be unsupportive to their adolescents’ negative emotions are key to adolescents using less ES.

Authors

• Tatiana Meza-Cervera, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer Julia Phillips, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Martha Ann Bell, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  Non-Presenting Author