Poster #209 - Maternal Emotion Socialization, Anxiety, and Child Temperament: Prospective Associations with Children’s Regulation of Anxiety

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Anxiety disorders are among the most common forms of childhood psychopathology, and are associated with both short-term and long-term impairments on a child’s functioning (Buss & McDoniel, 2016). Whereas it has been well established that certain parenting behaviors are related to child anxiety, the influence of specific parenting behaviors in socializing children’s emotion, such as maternal emotion coaching—parents’ acceptance, awareness, and discussion of children’s negative emotions—and maternal expressivity, is not fully explored (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996). This study examined if, and to what extent, mothers’ emotion coaching behaviors and emotion expression predicts children’s adaptive and maladaptive regulation of anxiety above and beyond child fearful temperament, child sex, and maternal anxiety.
Participants were 61 mother-child dyads drawn from a larger longitudinal study. Children were assessed at two time points: when they were 3-4 years old (T1) and when they were 5-6 years old (T2). At each time point, mothers completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for their trait anxiety and the Child Behavior Questionnaire Short Form for children’s temperamental fear. At T1, mother-child dyads participated in a one-day naturalistic observation at home where their conversations were audio recorded and coded for mother’s emotion coaching, positive, and negative expression. Children’s regulation of anxiety was measured during a laboratory task at T2 wherein the children were given three increasingly difficult shape puzzles to complete under a time restriction to elicit anxiety. Adaptive regulation of anxiety involved children’s positive expression and use of problem-solving talk and maladaptive regulation involved children’s anxiety expression and use of discouragement talk.
Two regression analyses (Table 1) were conducted to investigate the prospective contribution of maternal and child factors to children’s adaptive regulation of anxiety (i.e. positive expression and problem-solving talk). For parsimony nonsignificant predictor variables were removed from the final analysis. For the model predicting child positivity, maternal emotion coaching positively predicted child positive expression in the lab (ß=0.26, p<0.05). For the model predicting problem solving talk, mothers’ positive expression (ß=0.34, p<0.01) positively predicted child problem solving talk and mothers’ negative emotion expression (ß=-0.28, p<0.05) negatively predicted child problem solving talk in the lab at T2.
Two regression analyses (Table 2) were conducted on maladaptive regulation of anxiety—specifically, children’s anxiety expression and use of discouragement talk. For the model predicting child anxiety, mother positive expression (ß=0.32, p<0.05) were positive predictors of child anxiety, and boys showed higher level of anxiety (ß=0.37, p<0.01). For the model predicting child discouragement, although child sex and maternal trait anxiety together contributed significantly to the explanation of child anxiety, they each were only marginally significant.
These findings suggest that maternal emotion coaching and mother’s positive emotion expression between the ages 3 and 4 are associated with children’s later adaptive emotion-regulation capacities in response to anxiety. Results of this study further support the role of maternal emotion socialization on children’s regulation of anxiety.

Authors

• Karis Inboden, The Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Xin Feng, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Micah Gerhardt, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emma Hooper, California Lutheran University
  Non-Presenting Author