Emotion socialization is a two-way street

Abstract

The current study examined reciprocal interactions between parents’ emotion socialization behaviors and children’s emotion regulation and the relation between such interactions and child emotional and psychological outcomes. The present study adds to the literature by investigating the dynamic nature of emotion socialization through the use of a state-of-the-art behavioral coding system that captures the sequential nature of behaviors. Fifty four mother, father, and child (7 to 12 years old) triads participated in four (i.e., angry, happy, sad, anxious) emotion discussions. Parental emotion coaching and emotion dismissing and child adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation behaviors were coded. Parents reported on their child’s emotion regulation and psychological symptoms and children reported on their own emotion regulation. Results indicated that parents were more likely to follow children’ adaptive emotion regulation with emotion coaching versus emotion dismissing responses and children were more likely to use adaptive versus maladaptive emotion regulation in response to parents’ emotion coaching.