Poster #137 - Acquiring Socioemotional Skills in Childhood: The Contribution of Parents During Positive and Negative Situations

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

Regulating emotional responses as well as understand the emotional needs of oneself and others are important socialization processes that occur during development. While individual differences in arousal and intensity of reactivity play a large role in emotional development, a major factor in a child’s early emotion skills are learned through social interactions within the family (Padilla-Walker et al., 2020). Moreover, parental depression can hinder the parents’ ability to express appropriate emotions as well as to reduce their ability to assist their child in garnering an aptitude for emotion-based skills (Guhn et al., 2020). This study examined how children learn emotional information and management from their primary caretakers during interactions with positive and negative stories. 102 interactions between preschoolers (M age=4.13 years, SD= .65) and their parents were evaluated, with each parent-child pair participating in an emotion-focused storytelling and discussion task, whereby each parent discussed a positive-focused and negative-focused story with their child (counterbalanced order). Interactions between each parent-child dyads were assessed for both parent and child behaviors, with the preschooler’s behavior coded for their involvement, emotional comprehension, and concern and each parents’ behavior rated on their supportiveness, scaffolding, and expressiveness. The dyad together was also coded on dyadic unity which was defined as the pair showing interactive synchrony in their behaviors. In addition, parental depression (CES-D scores), parent ratings of the family’s emotional expressiveness (SEFQ, Halberstadt, 1995) and child temperament (CCTI) rating were obtained. Correlation and multiple regression analyses were conducted. In general, findings revealed that warm responsive and expressive parental behaviors contributed significantly to children’s cognitive and emotional skills during both positive and negative narrative interactions, with parents high in supportiveness and expressiveness having children who showed higher total expression, in addition to being more positively expressive, more involved, and more understanding of emotional concepts, (R²s range between .07 to .18, ps< .05). Alternatively, those families with heightened maternal depressive symptoms were less expressive (r(62)=-.325, p=.009) yet increased paternal depression was not related to the interactive behaviors exhibited with their child, p > .05. Moreover, parents with depressive symptoms, in general, had children that were less inquisitive and used fewer emotion words during the interaction with their parents (rs ranged from =-.27 to -.40, p < .05). Notably, while fathers did not differ in emotional expressiveness when reporting more depressive symptoms, they showed more emotion-focused behaviors only during the positively-valenced (compared to the negative) task, with more expressiveness and scaffolding as well as dyadic unity. These results reinforce previously established beliefs on the importance of emotionally open, positively expressive, and cognitively stimulating parent-child interactions on stimulating the child’s development of emotional, social, and regulatory competence. Depressive symptoms, parent, and valence did affect the outcomes. Findings will be discussed focusing on the family dynamics as well as investigating the dimensions of depressive symptoms present in the parents and their impact on preschoolers socioemotional patterns of responses.

Authors

• Nancy Aaron Jones, Florida Atlantic University
  Presenting Author

• Kristina G Smatrakaleva, Florida State University

• Jenna Salley, Florida Atlantic University