Poster #133 - Associations among parents’ emotion regulation and emotion socialization: The moderating role of family emotional climate

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Introduction: Supportive emotion socialization is associated with a myriad of positive outcomes for children, necessitating further research to identify contextual predictors of these parenting practices. Parents possessing adaptive emotion regulation (ER) skills are more likely to demonstrate positive emotion socialization toward their children (Morris et al., 2017), including more supportive responses to children’s negative emotions. As parents display strategies for coping with their emotions, they simultaneously cultivate an affective environment illustrating common behaviors or reaction tendencies associated with emotion coping that influence a child’s developing ability to manage emotion (Zeman et al., 2006). This study aimed to examine links between parents’ ER during interactions with their child and parents’ responses to children’s negative emotions, and whether these links might be moderated by emotional expressiveness within the family context.
Methods: Parents (N = 662; Mage = 36.81, SDage = 9.27) were recruited from Amazon Mturk. Participating parents identified primarily as women (60.6%), White (74.9%) and non-Latinx (90.2%). Participants completed self-report measures, including the novel Regulating Emotions in Parenting Scale (REPS), assessing parents' ER strategies in the parenting context. REPS subscales include two indices of ER difficulties (Suppression and Rumination) and one index of ER skills (Adaptive Strategies). Parents also completed the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES); composite scales of parents' supportive and unsupportive responses to children’s emotions were analyzed. The Family Expressiveness Questionnaire (FEQ) assessed positive emotional expressiveness within the family context.
Results: Bivariate correlations among study variables were generally in the predicted direction (see Table 1). Positive family emotional expressiveness was a significant moderator of various associations between parents' ER strategies and responses to children's negative emotions. Specifically, parents' suppression strategies were negatively associated with supportive responses to children's negative emotions at low (b = -.81, p < .001) and average (b = -.41, p < .001) levels of positive family emotional climate. Parents' suppression was also positively associated with parents' unsupportive responses to children's negative emotions at low (b = 1.65, p < .001), average (b = 1.97, p < .001), and high (b = 2.29, p < .001) levels of positive family emotional climate (b = .004, p < .05). Parents' rumination strategies were positively, and unexpectedly, associated with supportive responses to child negative emotions at low (b = .66, p < .001) and average (b = .42, p < .001) levels of positive family emotional climate. Finally, parents' rumination was positively associated with unsupportive responses to children's negative emotions but only at average (b = .27, p < .001) and high (b = .80, p < .001) levels of positive family emotional climate.
Discussion: Our results suggest that family emotional climate is a meaningful context in which parents’ own ER predicts how they socialize their children’s emotions. Surprisingly, results suggested that families with high positive emotional climate showed amplified relations between parents’ self-reported ER difficulties and unsupportive emotion socialization; these results will require further investigation. Future research will benefit from more diverse samples and direct behavioral observation of parents’ emotion behaviors within the family context.

Authors

• Taylor Brumbaugh, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Dominique Luisa La Barrie, University of Georgia

• Jenna Brianne Terry, University of Georgia

• Violeta J Rodriguez, University of Georgia

• Anne E Shaffer, University of Georgia