Temperamental Differences in Emotion Regulation: The role of Maternal Accuracy

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Emotion regulation (ER), or the processes that modulate emotion behavior and emotional expressions (Thompson, 1994), has been shown to influence many aspects of socioemotional development (Calkins & Mackler, 2011), and specifically the development of internalizing problems such as anxiety (Costello, et al., 2005). Emotional lability, or dysregulated negative affect, inflexibility, and difficulty recovering from negative emotional reactions (Shields & Cicchetti, 1997; Dunsmore, et al., 2011), is one aspect of ER. Children’s temperament has been associated with deficits in ER generally (Zalewski, et al., 2011), and fearful temperament has specifically been associated with differences in regulation of behavioral and physiological responses to novel stimuli (Buss 2011; Buss et al., 2018). However, the accuracy with which mothers predict their children’s emotions (MA) has been shown to interact with temperament in predicting children’s anxious behaviors (Kiel, et al., 2011;2016). Together, these findings suggest a moderated mediation framework in which MA and temperament interact to predict children’s ER, in turn predicting children’s anxiety.
The current study sought to replicate and extend findings associated with maternal accuracy and lay the groundwork for the full moderated mediation model. Does MA interact with fearful temperament at age 2 to predict children’s lability at age 3? Participants were 86 mother-child dyads drawn from a larger longitudinal study of children’s temperament and socioemotional development. At child age 2, families participated in a laboratory visit in which mothers made a series of predictions regarding their children’s behavior during series six fear eliciting tasks of varying threat-level. Children’s behavior was coded and latent profile analysis of fear across the tasks revealed three fearful temperament types; low fear, normative fear (fear increased with increasing threat), and dysregulated fear (i.e., high fear to low threat) (DF; See Buss, 2011 for complete methodology). MA score was measured using multi-level modeling, in which prediction-behavior pairs were nested within episode, and again nested within dyad. Lability was measured through mothers’ responses the Lability / Negativity subscale of the Emotion Regulation Checklist (Shields & Cicchetti, 1997).
Results indicated that MA interacted with temperament to predict lability. Specifically, as MA increased low fear children were reported to have higher lability (β = 2.3, p = .03), while DF children were reported to have lower lability (β = -2.74 , p = .02).
Taken together these finding suggest temperamental differences in ER such that low fear children are rated as lower in regulation while DF children are rated as higher in regulation, in line with previous literature indicating “over-regulation” in highly fearful children (Penela, et al., 2015). Importantly, these associations become stronger as MA increases. One potential explanation may be that children’s behaviors elicit changes in parent’s socialization behaviors which maintain / exacerbate emotional problems (Hastings, et al., 2019). More accurate mothers would better recognize children’s emotions, leading to increases in socialization behaviors such as overprotective/over-supportive parenting for DF children (as in Kiel et al., 2016) and/or emotionally unsupportive parenting for low fear children. Future research will seek to determine if this interaction fits into the proposed moderated mediation.

Authors

• Austen Trainer, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Presenting Author

• Kristin A. Buss, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Non-Presenting Author