About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 14. Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

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Children who develop effective emotion regulation (ER) strategies, like reframing situations, seeking support, and labeling their emotions positively, show better social interactions, resilience, and problem-solving skills. Parents can foster effective ER through emotion coaching, which teaches children to understand and express their emotions (Gottman et al., 1996). Emotion coaching has been linked to improved emotional awareness and physiological regulation at age 5, which predicted ER at age 8 (Gottman et al., 1996). However, child temperament, particularly emotional reactivity, can relate to how effective emotion coaching is, because highly reactive children may struggle more with regulating emotions (Dunsmore et al., 2016). This study examined whether children's temperamental sadness moderated the link between parental emotion coaching and child ER.
Parents (n=115, M age=39.25 years, SD=4.89 years) and their school-aged children (M age=88.43 months, SD=8.10 months) discuss a time when children felt happy and a time when children felt upset. Parental emotion coaching was coded as encouragement of children’s positive emotions in both discussions. Child regulation was coded in 5-second intervals from 0 = no talking to the experimenter (E), 1 = talking to E using neutral language, and 2 = talking to E using negative emotional words, with or without prompting. Higher scores indicate higher regulation through the child expressing negative emotion. Child sadness was assessed using the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire – Very Short Form (CBQ-VSF; Putnam & Rothbart, 2006), where mothers rated 3 items on a 7-point scale (Extremely Untrue to Extremely True).
Two regression analyses were conducted to examine whether child sadness moderated the relations of emotion coaching to child ER (Table 1). Emotion coaching for happy and upsetting events, along with sadness, were centered to create interaction terms (Aiken & West, 1991). Child sex was included as a covariate. The interaction between encouragement of positive emotion during the happy event and child sadness approached significance (p=.06). Whisman and McClelland (2005) have recommended probing interaction terms at p<.10 because of difficulties in detecting interactions in social science research. Simple slope analyses showed that for children with high and moderate sadness, parental encouragement of positive emotion during the happy event significantly predicted more talking to the experimenter using negative emotion words but not for children with low sadness (Figure 1). The model for the upset event only approached significance (p=.09).
These findings suggest that emotion coaching, especially encouraging positive emotions when discussing happy events, may help children with higher temperamental sadness express themselves more freely using negative emotion words during a challenging context. Parental encouragement of positive emotions during positive events might help children learn to verbalize and express how they are feeling in less stressful contexts. Encouraging positive feelings may also help children deal effectively with sadness as they are redirected to positive emotions. This coaching might be less effective during upsetting events, as children are already focused on their sadness and need other forms of support. Future research should continue to examine how the match between children's temperamental reactivity and parental emotion coaching is associated with child ER.

Author information

Author	Role
Charlotte Menke, Virginia Tech	Presenting author
Kassidy Mieses, Virginia Tech	Non-presenting author
Meredith G. Atanasio, M.S., Virginia Tech	Non-presenting author
Cynthia L. Smith, Ph.D., Virginia Tech	Non-presenting author

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