Parental Responsiveness to Emotion Moderates Pathways from Emotion Dysregulation to Psychopathology in Trauma-Exposed Children

• In Event: Context Matters: Expanding Understanding of Child Emotion Regulation within Family Interactions and Conditions of Risk

Abstract

Trauma exposure in early childhood is a well-established risk factor for the development of psychopathology, with emotion dysregulation posited as a key mechanism linking trauma to later mental health problems (Weissman et al., 2019). Yet, salient indirect effects and contextual moderators have rarely been examined together, which is necessary for understanding how and for whom trauma exposure increases risk for psychopathology. This study evaluated if traumatic life events in early childhood had indirect effects on internalizing and externalizing problems in middle childhood through negative emotionality and expressive suppression of emotions and if parental responsiveness to emotion moderated these indirect effects.

Participants included 113 children (51% female) and their parents, nearly all of whom were living in poverty. 59% of children were White, 16% Black, 25% Multiracial, and 46% Hispanic/Latinx. Number of traumatic life events in early childhood was assessed using the Diagnostic Infant Preschool Assessment. In middle childhood, children and their parents participated in a 5-minute videotaped interaction task. Negative emotionality was operationalized as the proportion of children’s negative emotion clips out of all clips, and expressive suppression was operationalized as the proportion of children’s emotion clips with no expressed emotion out of all clips. Parental responsiveness to child emotion was operationalized as the difference between the proportion of parents’ positive responses (i.e., reflective statements, positive problem-solving, supportive statements) out of all responses, and the proportion of parent’s negative responses (i.e., criticism, negative commands, minimizing/dismissive statements) out of all responses. Internalizing and externalizing t-scores were obtained via parent-report on the Child Behavior Checklist. We tested two path models with negative emotionality and expressive suppression as mechanisms; multiple-group analyses did not find child ethnicity or child gender differences on any path coefficients.

For the negative emotionality pathway (Figure 1A), more traumatic life events in early childhood predicted higher levels of negative emotionality in middle childhood, which in turn was associated with higher internalizing and externalizing problems (95% CIs for indirect effects, respectively: [.10, .40], [.12, .35]). Parental responsiveness moderated the association between negative emotionality and internalizing/externalizing. Simple slopes revealed that negative emotionality was associated with internalizing problems when parents displayed low, b=.63, p=<.001, but not high, b=5.72, p=.30, responsiveness (Figure 2A). Negative emotionality was also associated with externalizing problems when parents displayed low, b=.25, p<.001, but not high, b=6.04, p=.27, responsiveness (Figure 2B).

For the expressive suppression pathway (Figure 1b), more traumatic life events in early childhood predicted higher levels of suppression in middle childhood, which in turn was associated with lower internalizing and higher externalizing problems (95% CIs for indirect effects, respectively: [.05, .24], [.15, .33]). Simple slopes revealed that suppression was associated with internalizing problems when parents displayed low, b=-.13, p<.001, but not high, b=5.72, p=.40, responsiveness (Figure 2C). Parental responsiveness did not moderate the association between suppression and externalizing.

Results revealed two critical components of emotion dysregulation, negative emotionality and expression suppression, that may serve as distinct mechanisms, and suggested that parental responsiveness to child emotion is an important contextual factor in the development of psychopathology following trauma.

Authors

• Lindsay Huffhines, Brown University Medical School
  Presenting Author

• Ronald Seifer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Stephanie H Parade, Brown University

• Audrey R. Tyrka, Brown University