Poster #60 - Emotion Socialization Differs Based on Perceived Justifiability of Child’s Emotion

• In Event: Poster Session 08

Abstract

Children’s emotional development is theorized to be included by parental socialization of emotions (e.g., explicit acknowledgement of emotional expression and providing comfort). These behaviors provide opportunities for children to experience and develop adaptive emotion regulation strategies (Shaffer et al., 2012; Spinrad et al., 2004). On the other hand, some forms of emotion socialization are non-supportive (e.g., minimizing the emotion or punishing children for expressions of emotion), which tend to undermine emotion processing (Fabes et al., 2008; Rodas et al., 2017). Parents’ own emotional and cognitive processes are likely to influence their emotion socialization behaviors that may explain patterns of responses. In particular, the perceived justifiability of children’s negative emotions may be an important factor for parents’ socialization behaviors, as parents may only attend to emotional displays that they feel are reasonable/appropriate (Meyer et al., 2014). We hypothesized that parents’ own feelings of sadness or guilt in response to their child’s emotional expression would be associated with process-oriented emotion socialization (e.g., holding child, acknowledging child’s emotion). In contrast, parents’ emotions of anger and frustration would be associated with more outcome-oriented emotion socialization (e.g., telling child to stop, walking away from child), particularly in response to children’s unjustified emotions.

Participants included parents (N = 234; 58% women) of preschool-aged children (146 unique children; M = 53.37 months, SD = 9.94 months). Parents completed the Comfort, Attunement and Validation of Emotions measure (CAVE; Humphreys & Lempres, 2022). Parents were asked to consider their children’s negative emotions when justified as well as unjustified. Then, parents reported the emotions they feel and their parenting behaviors in response to their children’s negative emotions, answering separately for justified and unjustified negative emotions.

Parents were more likely to report feeling emotions such as anger and frustration when they viewed children’s negative emotions as unjustified relative to justified, and for these unjustified negative emotions, parental anger and frustration were related to more outcome-oriented behaviors. Parental emotions such as sadness and guilt, however, were related to more process-oriented behaviors, regardless of whether parents felt children’s negative emotions were justified or unjustified (see Table 1).

Findings highlight the interrelatedness of emotional and cognitive processes within the parenting context and their potential influence on emotion socialization behaviors. Specifically, we found that parents are less likely to respond with behaviors that support emotional processing when emotions are viewed as unjustified compared to justified, and parents’ feelings of anger and frustration may contribute to the likelihood that parents will respond to children’s negative emotions with behaviors most likely to stop the emotional expression.

Authors

• Lauren Bailes, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Garrett Ennis

• Sarah Maren Lempres, Duke Univeristy

• David Cole

• Kathryn L. Humphreys, Vanderbilt University