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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

How parents respond to their children’s emotions, and coregulate with their children, critically influences child socioemotional development. However, these processes cannot be fully understood without considering the family’s context, including parent-child interactions and experiences of harsh parenting, racial discrimination, and maltreatment and other trauma. Furthermore, determining whether a parent or child’s reactions and emotion regulation strategies are helpful or harmful requires exploration of multiple mediators and moderators, yet few studies undertake such a comprehensive approach. This symposium presents three innovative, longitudinal studies beginning in early childhood that together, shed light on these complex associations. By integrating perspectives from clinical and developmental psychology, incorporating gold-standard assessments, and drawing from racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse populations, a more nuanced understanding of child emotion regulation will emerge. Paper 1 explores how affective, behavioral, and physiological coregulation in mother-child and father-child dyads mediates associations between adaptive and maladaptive parenting and child internalizing/externalizing problems. Paper 2 investigates how Black mothers’ experiences with discrimination, and positive racial identity, affects their beliefs about children’s emotion expressions, and in turn their attempts to suppress children’s negative emotions. Paper 3 examines how early childhood trauma predicts two facets of emotion dysregulation (negative emotionality and expressive suppression), which in turn are associated with child internalizing/externalizing problems among children whose parents respond negatively to their emotions. The discussant – an international expert on parent-child emotion regulation – will draw on her research and clinical experiences treating families with multiple risk factors to facilitate conversations on the implications of these results for family-based interventions.

Sub Unit

• Family Context & Processes

Chair

• Lindsay Huffhines, Brown University Medical School

Discussant

• Tina Montreuil, McGill University

Individual Presentations

• Mother-Child and Father-Child Affective, Behavioral, and Physiological Coregulation as Developmental Mechanisms Across Early Childhood - Presenting Author: Erika S. Lunkenheimer, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; Kayla Melissa Brown, Advocates for Human Potential; Catherine Diercks, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; Anneke E. Olson, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; Longfeng Li, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; Kivilcim D. Engel, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Between Worlds: Black Mothers’ Experiences with Discrimination and their Positive Racial Identity have Opposing Effects on their Reactions to Children’s Emotions - Presenting Author: Angel Sia Dunbar, University of Maryland - College Park; Stephanie Irby Coard, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Esther M. Leerkes, UNC Greensboro; Andrew Supple, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Parental Responsiveness to Emotion Moderates Pathways from Emotion Dysregulation to Psychopathology in Trauma-Exposed Children - Presenting Author: Lindsay Huffhines, Brown University Medical School; Ronald Seifer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Stephanie H Parade, Brown University; Audrey R. Tyrka, Brown University