Parental Emotion Socialization and Adult Outcomes: The Relationships Between Parental Supportiveness, Emotion Regulation, and Trait Anxiety (original) (raw)
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Research Square (Research Square), 2023
A child's ability to cope with stress is shaped by experiences in the parent-child relationship. The direct effect of a parent's response to anger and happiness in childhood on adolescents' and emerging adults' psychological distress, and the indirect effect through the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies, speci cally cognitive reappraisal and emotional suppression, were measured. To achieve our research aim we tested four parallel mediation models, using the bootstrapping method. A group of 497 participants, aged between 14 and 35 years (M = 18.62; SD = 3.32), 66% female (n = 332) and 34% male (n = 165), completed a questionnaire comprised of self-reporting measures. The results indicate direct effects between emotion socialization and distress for seven independent variables. The mother's and father's positive responses to anger and happiness are signi cant negative predictors of distress, the negative responses of both parents to happiness, and the mother's negative response to anger, but not the father's, are signi cant positive predictors of distress. The ndings also provide support for the mediating role of expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal for the mother's positive response to both, anger and happiness, as well as for the mother's negative response to the child's expression of happiness. None of father's responses, positive or negative, in relation to anger or happiness, are mediated by emotion regulation strategies in relation to distress. The ndings have some important theoretical and clinical implications for distressed adolescents and emerging adults. Theoretical and conceptual framing Developmental studies consistently indicate that parents have the primary role in shaping a child's emotional development, by their direct and indirect, verbal or nonverbal messages addressed to their children. Dealing with anger, happiness, fear or sadness are emotional and social daily lessons that put together parent and child in a positive or negative interaction with implications for their development and wellbeing. According to the tripartite model of parental in uences (Morris et al., 2007), the family context impacts emotional development through three pathways: the emotional climate, the parenting style and the emotional quality of marital relationships. Parent-child interactions, with all its components, (parents' reactions to the child's emotions), whether supportive (e.g. reward) or unsupportive (e.g. punishment, neglect) are re ected in their emotional life and represent an important predictor for the development of emotion regulation (Kullik & Petermann, 2013) and wellbeing (Root & Denham, 2010; Houltberg et al., 2012). Thus, parental emotion socialization is a process that helps a child to identify and appropriately express and manage their emotions, due to the parents' reactions to their child's emotions. Retrospective reports of adolescents have shown that parental socialization emotional strategies project emotional effects into adulthood. The Malatesta-Magai model of parental style of emotion socialization (Malatesta-Magai, 1991), that de ned the concepts and variables of this study, delimits ve strategies, used by parents when it comes to emotion socialization: reward, punishment, override, neglect and magnify. From a functionalist approach, emotion socialization implies responses to concrete emotions. In this research, we will analyze anger and happiness, because a number of studies have identi ed the existence of core emotions relevant for emotional development, frequently implied in internalization or externalization problems (Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007; Zeman et al., 2010). Anger is an emotion that communicates a need for limits and rules and activates a defense system. Happiness functions as a signal to make some activities that bring personal satisfaction, promote positive relationships through emotional contagion and wellbeing ((Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007). According to a processual model of emotion regulation, (Gross, 1998) there are lots of strategies that can intervene in different moments of emotional experience: anterior-focused, like situation selection, situation modi cation, attentional deployment and cognitive change or response-focused that can be a response modulation. A speci c type of cognitive change is cognitive reappraisal (CR) and, for response modulation, there is expressive suppression (ER). CR and ES are two strategies with multiple implications for mental health and wellbeing. A person who activates CR tends to negotiate stressful events by interpreting them in an optimistic manner (John & Gross, 2004; Haga et al., 2009) and have a high level of life satisfaction and self-esteem, a lower level of anxiety, depression or posttraumatic stress disorder (Zimmer-Gembeck et al., 2022); Miklósi et al., 2014; Kullik & Petermann, 2013). ES involves the inhibition of emotion expression and leads to a series of psychological consequences, like both externalizing and internalizing problems in early childhood, through adolescence and emerging adulthood (Buckner et al., 2003; (Cheung et al., 2019). Although together, all these theories and models explain the emotional impact of parents with regards their child's development; it is important to extend knowledge by examining the role of emotion regulation strategies, like protective factors, between parental in uences and distress (Cloitre et al., 2019). Problem statement Parental emotion socialization and its emotional consequences Signi cant correlations between negative emotions socialization and internalization issues are a constant of several studies; thus, sadness or fear, punishment or neglect, were associated with high levels of psychological distress in adulthood (Brand & Klimes-Dougan, 2010); Silk & House, 2011; Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007). Punishment of positive emotions correlates with high levels of distress, while reward is associated with lower levels of distress (Ramakrishnan et al., 2019). Although the topic of emotion socialization is important and relevant in multiple areas of psychology, there are few studies that have examined the socialization process of speci c negative (e.g. fear, anger) or positive emotions (e.g. happiness), separately by the mother and father (Root & Denham, 2010). Furthermore, there is relative extensive research on negative emotions and a lack of research in positive socialization emotions (Ramakrishnan et al., 2019).
Healthcare
A child’s ability to cope with stress is shaped by experiences in a parent–child relationship. In this study, the direct effect of a parent’s response to anger and happiness in childhood on adolescents’ and emerging adults’ psychological distress and the indirect effect through the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies—specifically, cognitive reappraisal and emotional suppression—were measured. To achieve our research aim, we tested four parallel mediation models using the bootstrapping method. A group of 497 participants aged between 14 and 35 years (M = 18.62; SD = 3.32), 66% female (n = 332) and 34% male (n = 165), completed a questionnaire comprising self-reporting measures. The results indicate direct effects between emotion socialization and distress for seven independent variables. The mother’s and father’s positive responses to anger and happiness are significant negative predictors of distress; the negative responses of both parents to happiness, and the mother’s ...
Journal of abnormal child psychology, 2016
Anxious youth exhibit heightened emotional reactivity, particularly to social-evaluative threat, such as peer evaluation and feedback, compared to non-anxious youth. Moreover, normative developmental changes during the transition into adolescence may exacerbate emotional reactivity to peer negative events, particularly for anxious youth. Therefore, it is important to investigate factors that may buffer emotional reactivity within peer contexts among anxious youth. The current study examined the role of parenting behaviors in child emotional reactivity to peer and non-peer negative events among 86 anxious youth in middle childhood to adolescence (Mean age = 11.29, 54 % girls). Parenting behavior and affect was observed during a social-evaluative laboratory speech task for youth, and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods were used to examine youth emotional reactivity to typical daily negative events within peer and non-peer contexts. Results showed that parent positive behavi...
Parental Emotion Socialization in Adolescence: Differences in Sex, Age and Problem Status
Social Development, 2007
There is a paucity of research on how mothers and fathers socialize emotion in their adolescent sons and daughters. This study was based on 220 adolescents (range 11-to 16-years-old) who exhibit a range of emotional and behavioral problems and their parents. Parental responses to their children's displays of sadness, anger and fear were assessed. Mothers were found to be more engaged in their children's emotional lives than were fathers. With a few important exceptions (e.g., boys were punished for expressions of anger more than girls), adolescent girls and boys were socialized in much the same way. Parents of older adolescents were generally less supportive and more punitive toward emotional displays. Systematic links between adolescent problem status and parent approaches to emotion socialization were found. These findings on how parents socialize emotions in their adolescents have important implications for theory as well as practice.
Journal of Child and Family Studies, 2010
We conducted a pilot study of the initial development of a self-report measure assessing how adolescents react when parents respond in a helpful manner to their sad emotional experiences. Participants were late adolescents (ages 18–20) attending a large, racially diverse urban university (N = 86; 75% women; 46% racial/ethnic minority). A broad range of relationship-oriented literatures (e.g., early childhood and marital) were considered in creating items for the Adolescent Reactions to Parents (ARP) scale. A 3 factor solution (Accepting, Avoidant, and Attacking) appeared to provide the most parsimonious fit to the data. Adequate levels of reliability were observed for each of the three ARP subscales. Zero-order correlations among subscales of the ARP were moderate in strength. Findings indicated that participants who reported more avoidant and attacking reactions also reported more adjustment difficulties including emotion regulation difficulties and symptoms of depression. Results suggest that the ARP scale has the potential to be a valuable tool for advancing knowledge related to the socialization of emotions.
Developmental Psychology, 2020
A fundamental question in developmental science is how parental emotion socialization processes are associated with children's subsequent adaptation. Few extant studies have examined this question across multiple developmental periods and levels of analysis. Here, we tested whether mothers' supportive and nonsupportive reactions to their 5-year-old children's negative emotions were associated with teacher and adolescent self-reported adjustment at age 15 via children's physiological and behavioral emotion regulation at age 10 (N = 404). Results showed that maternal supportive reactions to their children's negative emotions were associated with children's greater emotion regulation in a laboratory task and also a composite of mother and teacher reports of emotion regulation at age 10. Maternal nonsupportive reactions to their children's negative emotions were uncorrelated with supportive reactions, but were associated with poorer child physiological regulation and also poorer mother-and teacher-reported emotion regulation at age 10. In turn, better physiological regulation at age 10 was associated with more adolescent-reported social competence at age 15. Furthermore, teacher and mother reports of emotion regulation at age 10 were associated with increased adolescent adjustment across all domains. Mediational effects from nonsupportive and supportive reactions to adolescent adjustment tested via bootstrapping were significant. Our findings suggest that mothers' reactions to their children's negative emotions in early childhood may play a role in their children's ability to regulate their arousal both physiologically and behaviorally in middle childhood, which in turn may play a role in their ability to manage their emotions and behaviors and to navigate increasingly complex social contexts in adolescence.
Journal of Family Psychology, 2009
The present research examined parental beliefs about children's negative emotions, parentreported marital conflict/ambivalence, and child negative emotionality and gender as predictors of mothers' and fathers' reported reactions to their kindergarten children's negative emotions and self-expressiveness in the family (N ϭ 55, two-parent families). Models predicting parents' nonsupportive reactions and negative expressiveness were significant. For both mothers and fathers, more accepting beliefs about children's negative emotions were associated with fewer nonsupportive reactions, and greater marital conflict/ambivalence was associated with more negative expressiveness. Furthermore, interactions between child negative emotionality and parental resources (e.g., marital conflict/ambivalence; accepting beliefs) emerged for fathers' nonsupportive reactions and mothers' negative expressiveness. In some instances, child gender acted as a moderator such that associations between parental beliefs about emotions and the emotion socialization outcomes emerged when child and parent gender were concordant.
Emotion Regulation and Personality as Predictors of Mothers' Emotion Socialization Practices
Family Relations, 2020
Background: Parental emotion regulation (ER) and emotion socialization have been identified as key factors contributing to children's emotional competence; however, only a handful of studies have assessed the relationship between these constructs. Objective: The goal of the present study was to determine whether parental ER would predict parents' self-reported emotion socialization practices above and beyond the influence of personality. Method: Parents completed a series of self-report measures online. After data cleaning, 104 mothers of children between the ages of 8 and 12 years were retained for analyses. Results: Hierarchal regressions revealed that mothers who reported higher levels of ER skills and more frequent use of cognitive reappraisal were more likely to report engaging in supportive response behaviors when controlling for personality. Moreover, maternal reappraisal was significantly and inversely associated with reports of unsupportive emotion socialization. Conclusion: Findings provide evidence to support the association between maternal ER and emotion socialization behaviors.
2011
Using the General Theory of Family Communication Patterns (FCPT) and Emotion Regulation Theory (ERT) of Meta-emotion, Parenting, and Child Outcomes, this dissertation sought to investigate adults‟ emotion socialization in their family of origin through an examination of multiple family schemata. Furthermore, the interactions of parental meta-emotions, family communication patterns, and family communication environments were investigated. Two surveys were used in this study. First, 228 adultchildren across two universities in the western United States responded to items retrospectively describing the family communication patterns and family communication environments within their home of origin during their adolescence. Additionally, adultchildren described the meta-emotion philosophies of their parents during the adult-child‟s adolescence. Analysis of the data revealed a positive association between emotion coaching (EC) and conversation orientation, as well as positive associations...
Highlights • Benefit of parental involvement in therapy when parents exhibit high expressed emotion (EE). • Addition of parent training improves child's symptom reduction and diagnosis remission. • At follow-up, adolescents’ treatment outcomes were maintained. • Parents’ EE status changed from high to low after receiving parent training. . Decrease in parental EE level had further impact on the child's improvement. Abstract The role that parents’ involvement may play in improving their child's social anxiety is still under debate. This paper aimed to investigate whether training parents with high expressed emotion (EE) could improve outcomes for adolescent social anxiety intervention. Fifty-two socially anxious adolescents (aged 13–18 years), whose parents exhibited high levels of expressed emotion, were assigned to either (a) a school-based intervention with an added parent training component, or (b) a school-based program focused solely on intervening with the adolescent (no parental involvement). Post-treatment and 12-month follow-up findings showed that school-based intervention with parent training was superior to the adolescent-specific program, yielding significant reductions in diagnosis remission, social and depressive symptomatology, particularly when the EE status of parents changed. Overall, the findings suggest that high-EE parents of children with social anxiety need to be involved in their child's therapy.