Poster #126 - The Impact of SES and Parent Stress on Parent Emotion Talk

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

Parent’s use of emotion language with their children predicts a variety of socio-cognitive skills, including prosocial behavior and emotion understanding (Drummond et al., 2014; Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006). It is therefore important to understand the variation that can happen in this talk.

The present study focused specifically on two factors that might influence parents’ emotion language: socioeconomic status (SES) and parent stress. Thompson et al. (2016) found that higher SES parents who experienced lower levels of stress asked more meta-cognitive questions of their children than parents who were lower SES or experiencing higher levels of stress. This finding suggests that SES and stress can interact to influence parent-child conversations.

However, the influence of these factors on parent emotion talk is less clear. Evidence regarding the relationship between SES and parents’ emotion talk is mixed: some studies have found that lower SES parents engage in less emotion talk (Flannagan & Perese, 1998), but others have failed to find SES differences in emotion talk (Garrett-Peters et al., 2011). Moreover, to our knowledge, no study has examined whether SES interacts with parent stress to impact the quantity and nature of the emotion language that parents use when engaging with their child.

To address this question, this study tested a socioeconomically diverse sample of 43 parent-child dyads (child age: 43.7-66.0 months; M = 56.4 months). SES was assessed via household income. Parent stress was measured via the Parental Stress Scale (Berry & Jones, 1995); higher scores indicated greater stress.

Parent language was assessed via two interactive tasks. In the picture-book task (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006), dyads viewed a wordless picture-book that contained images designed to elicit discussion of emotions (e.g., boy smiling while building blocks). In the model-building task (Thompson et al., 2016), dyads were shown a toy marble run and were instructed to recreate the model using their own set of blocks. In both tasks, dyads were left alone for 10 minutes to complete the activity. Interactions were transcribed and coded for the number of emotion terms and the valence of each term (positive, negative).

Generalized linear models controlling for the number of parent words in the task revealed a significant interaction of household income and parent stress on the amount of emotion talk parents produced in the picture-book task, χ2(3) = 12.06, p = .007, and a marginal interaction for these factors on the amount of emotion talk in the model task, χ2(3) = 6.31, p = .098. Higher income parents experiencing lower levels of stress produced more emotion talk than parents who were lower income or more stressed. A significant interaction of income and stress also emerged for the use of positive valence emotion terms in both tasks, both ps < .05, with higher SES/low stress parents producing more positive emotion talk than other groups.

These results suggest that SES and parent stress interact to influence both the quantity and nature of the emotion language that parents use with their children, and these effects emerge in multiple interactive contexts.

Authors

• Hersukhdeep Kaur Kang, university of California merced
  Presenting Author

• Maritza Miramontes, University of California - Davis

• James Z Sullivan, University of California - Merced

• Rose M Scott, University of California - Merced