Investigating Maternal Discrete Emotion Socialization Profiles Across Time and in Relation to Child Psychopathology Symptoms

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Parent emotion socialization (ES) denotes how parents impart their beliefs and practices about emotion regulation and expressivity to children (Eisenberg et al., 1998). One method of ES—parents’ supportive and non-supportive responses to children’s emotion displays—strongly relates to child psychological and socioemotional functioning (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Morris et al., 2007). Moreover, research suggests that parent ES may differ by emotion displayed, with said differences uniquely predicting child psychopathology (Garside & Klimes-Dougan, 2002; O’Neal & Magai, 2005). Currently, we extend this literature by using a person- and growth-centered approach to identify mothers’ patterns of anger, sadness, and worry responses across three years in early childhood, as well as the extent to which these growth profiles are associated with child psychopathology.

All data have been collected. Data cleaning and analyses were paused due to Covid-19; however, data cleaning is ongoing and we will complete data analysis by January 2021. One hundred and forty-nine mother-toddler dyads participated when children (39.6% girls, 83.9% White) were 2, 3, and 4 years old (T1, T2, and T3, respectively). At each time-point, mothers reported on their responses to their toddlers’ emotions using the Coping with Toddler’s Negative Emotions Scale (Spinrad et al., 2004) at T1 and T2 and the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (Fabes et al., 2002) at T3. Specifically, mothers indicated which ES responses they would use when reacting to child anger/frustration, sadness/hurt, and worry/fear. Within each emotion-specific vignette set, supportive ES responses comprised mothers’ problem-solving, emotion expression-encouraging, and emotion-focused reactions. Each emotion-specific non-supportive ES response composite included mothers’ punitive/scolding, minimizing/dismissing, and distressed reactions. At T3, mothers completed the Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (Carter et al., 2003) to report on children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. We will use FIML to handle missing data.

Within Mplus v.7.3 (Muthén & Muthén, 2012), we will utilize growth mixture modeling to characterize the growth trajectory of mothers’ ES responses (Aim 1), determine if there are latent profiles of mothers whose ES growth trajectories differ from the overall estimate (Aim 2), and examine if any emergent ES profiles relate to child psychopathology at T3 (Aim 3). We expect that overall, supportive ES will decrease and non-supportive ES will increase across time, with changes steepest for anger. We anticipate (at minimum) three profiles: (1) mothers with globally high supportive ES and low non-supportive ES across time, (2) mothers with globally low supportive ES and high non-supportive ES across time, and (3) mothers decreasing supportive ES and increasing non-supportive ES across time, with relations strongest for anger responses. We expect that ES profiles with steadily high or increasing non-supportive ES over time will be associated with more child psychopathology, as opposed to profiles with steadily lower or decreasing levels of non-supportive ES. We expect emotion-specific differences in outcome prediction (e.g., sadness and worry socialization most predictive of internalizing, anger socialization most predictive of externalizing). Results will elucidate the understudied growth trajectory of maternal ES, as well as how mothers’ global and emotion-specific ES strategies relate to child psychopathology.

Authors

• Natalee Price, Miami University - Ohio
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth J Kiel, Miami University - Ohio
  Non-Presenting Author

• Aaron M. Luebbe, Miami University - Ohio
  Non-Presenting Author