Poster #147 - Intergenerational Transmission of Emotion Regulation: Mediation through Mothers’ Responses to Children’s Negative Emotionality

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Theorists have suggested that parents’ responses to children’s negative emotions shapes children’s abilities to cope with their own emotional states (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996). Additionally, it is thought that parents’ capacity to regulate their own emotions precedes their ability to respond contingently and responsively to their children’s emotions (Morris et al., 2007). This study examines the association between mothers’ difficulties in emotion regulation, their responses to their children’s negative emotionality, and children’s own emotion regulation. It was hypothesized that mothers’ responses to children’s negative emotions would mediate the relation between maternal and child emotion regulation, as well as for the relation between maternal emotion regulation and children’s behavioral regulation for tasks that require emotional control, but not for tasks that are cognitive in nature. The sample consisted of 69 low-income mothers (M age = 30.47 years, 80.3% Black) and their preschoolers (51.3% female; age 36-72 months; M=51.85) recruited from Head Starts and other community providers. The sample was enriched for exposure to violence and trauma. We examined the relation between mothers’ emotion dysregulation (Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale) and children’s parent-reported emotion dysregulation (Child Behavior Checklist-90), as well as observed behavioral dysregulation (Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment), characterized by cool self-regulation, which involves cognitive and goal-directed processes, and hot self-regulation, which involves emotional processes. We also examined indirect effects via a composite of the three non-supportive responses to children’s negative emotions subscales of the parent-report Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale, which had good internal consistency (α = .83). As the sample was enriched for violence exposure, we also tested whether parents’ exposure to violence moderated the mediation. Results indicated that mothers’ non-supportive responses (b = 2.01, CI [.02, 3.09]) mediated the association between mothers’ reports of their own and their children’s abilities to regulate their emotions. This mediating effect was also significant for the model predicting children’s hot self-regulation (b = -0.18, CI [-.51, -.02]), but was not significant for cool self-regulation (b = -0.26, CI [-.91, .001]). Parent violence exposure was not found to moderate the mediation (b = -0.22, CI [-1.11, .09]). How mothers’ respond to their children’s emotionality mediated the association between mothers’ emotion dysregulation and children’s parent-reported emotion dysregulation, as well as observed behavioral self-regulation for tasks that are emotionally driven, but not for tasks that are more cognitive in nature. This is consistent with emotion socialization theories that suggest that children learn self-regulation from parents’ modeling and responses to children’s emotional displays, which are associated with parents’ own emotion regulation skills. These findings highlight the importance of targeting not only parent and child regulatory skills, but also parenting behaviors that are a product of parent dysregulation and are predictive of child dysregulation. Future research should consider the influence of contextual stressors that may affect the emotion socialization process.

Authors

• Justin T Carreras, Tulane University
  Presenting Author

• Sarah A Gray, Tulane University
  Non-Presenting Author