Developmental Pathways Toward Emotional Risk and Resilience: the Role of Parent Characteristics

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

According to the developmental psychopathology framework for conceptualizing human typical and atypical development, many complex and interacting factors influence developmental pathways toward and away from maladaptive functioning and – ultimately – psychopathology (Masten, 2006). Children’s overall social-emotional competence represents a key marker of resilience (Domitrovich et al., 2017). In contrast, difficulty with emotion regulation (ER) is considered a hallmark feature of many forms of both internalizing and externalizing psychopathology across the lifespan (Aldao et al., 2016). Given the prominent influence that parents have on children’s overall social-emotional functioning, it is important to consider parenting factors that are associated with emotional risk and resilience among children.
The present symposium highlights the significance of parent characteristics that introduce both risk and resilience into children’s emotional developmental pathways. The first paper identifies parents’ difficulties with ER as one avenue for the intergenerational transmission of trauma and its impact on children’s ER. The second paper underscores the developmental significance of parent ER by demonstrating an association between parents’ difficulties modulating their physiological response to distress and infant’s use of maladaptive ER strategies. The third paper identifies a relationship between parental above-average expression of anger and children’s difficulty downregulating anger and social-behavioral problems in school among families experiencing homelessness. The final paper provides evidence that parenting interventions targeting parental reflective functioning (RF), a parenting quality related to how parents interpret a child’s behavior and emotions, can successfully improve RF, and that these improvements are associated with next-generation social-emotional competence.

Sub Unit

• Developmental Psychopathology

Chair

• Sarah E. Freeman, Eastern Michigan University

Individual Presentations

• Parent Emotion Regulation Mediates the Relation Between Parent Trauma History and Child Emotion Regulation - Presenting Author: Sarah E. Freeman, Eastern Michigan University; Angela D Staples, Eastern Michigan University; Tamara M. Loverich, Eastern Michigan University; Jamie Lawler, Eastern Michigan University

• Pregnant Women’s Physiological Responses to Infant Distress Predict Infants’ Behavioral Avoidance During the Still-Face Paradigm - Presenting Author: Bailey Speck, University of Utah; Jennifer Isenhour, University of Utah; Mengyu (Miranda) Gao, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, China; Liz Conradt, Duke University; Sheila E Crowell, University of Utah; Lee Raby, University of Utah

• Parental Affect Profiles Predict Child Emotion Regulation and Classroom Adjustment in Families Experiencing Homelessness - Presenting Author: Madelyn Labella, William and Mary; Rebecca Distefano, Roger Williams University; Jillian Merrick, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago; Jyothi Ramakrishnan; Eric Lee Thibodeau; Ann S. Masten, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Infant Mental Health Home Visiting Improves Children’s Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms via Parental Reflective Functioning - Presenting Author: Jerrica Pitzen, Rochester University; Megan M. Julian, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor; Holly Elisabeth Brophy-Herb, Michigan State University; Alissa Huth-Bocks, Case Western Reserve University; Jamie Lawler, Eastern Michigan University; Maria Muzik, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor; Katherine L Rosenblum, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor