Unidirectional or Bidirectional? Relation between Parental Responsiveness and Emotion Regulation in Children with and without Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Parenting is crucial for emotion regulation in children. Much less is known, however, concerning the association between parenting and emotion regulation in children with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), who are known to have poor emotion regulation. The current study aimed to examine how parental responsiveness and child emotion regulation related either unidirectionally or bidirectionally to one another over time and to investigate whether the associations were different in ODD and non-ODD groups. Data were collected each year for three consecutive years from a sample of 256 parents of children with ODD and 265 parents of children without ODD in China. The results from the random intercepts cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) suggested that the directionality of the link between parental responsiveness and child emotion regulation differs according to ODD status. The non-ODD group demonstrated a unidirectional link between early emotion regulation and subsequent parental responsiveness, consistent with the "child effect". However, in the ODD group, the link between parental responsiveness and emotion regulation was transactional, in line with social coercion theory. Multiple-group comparisons found that increased parental responsiveness was more strongly associated with improved child emotion regulation in the ODD group only. The research established a dynamic and longitudinal relationship between parental responsiveness and emotion regulation and suggested that intensive interventions should aim to improve parental responsiveness to children with ODD.

Supportive Emotion Socialization Mitigates Risk Between Maternal Emotion Regulation Difficulties and Preschooler Emotion Regulation

Few studies have examined protective maternal factors that may mitigate the intergenerational transmission of risk of maternal emotion regulation difficulties on child outcomes. The current study tested whether supportive maternal emotion socialization moderated the association between maternal emotion regulation difficulties and child emotion regulation behaviors. Participants were 68 mother-preschooler (aged 36-60 months) dyads that were oversampled for maternal symptoms of borderline personality disorder, in order to achieve greater variability in the range of maternal emotion regulation difficulties. Maternal emotion regulation difficulties and supportive emotion socialization behaviors were measured using self-report questionnaires, and child emotion regulation was coded during a frustration-eliciting blocked goal task. Results partially supported study hypotheses, such that trait maternal emotion regulation difficulties were associated with child displays of sadness at low levels of supportive maternal emotion socialization, but not when mothers engaged in higher levels of supportive emotion socialization. These findings suggest that maternal emotion regulation and emotion socialization are distinctly related to child emotion expression and regulatory actions, and that adaptive maternal emotion socialization may mitigate some of the adverse transgenerational impacts of impaired emotion regulation.

Family Emotion Expressiveness Mediates the Relations Between Maternal Emotion Regulation and Child Emotion Regulation

While there is a growing body of literature examining the influence of emotion socialization on children's emotional and social development, there is less research on what predicts emotion socialization behaviors among parents. The current study explores maternal emotion regulation difficulties as a predictor of emotion socialization practices, specifically, family emotion expressiveness. Further, the current study examines the role of family emotion expressiveness as a possible mediator of the relations between maternal and child emotion regulation in a community sample of 110 mother-child dyads with preschool-aged children. Analyses revealed that positive family expressiveness mediated the relations between maternal emotion dysregulation and child emotion regulation and thus presents important clinical implications for existing emotion socialization interventions.

Emotion regulation and psychopathological symptoms of Chinese school-age children: A person-centred and multi-informant approach

Emotion regulation (ER) is a critical component of children's development. Many previous studies have utilised a single-assessment method to reflect child ER, which might result in losing important information regarding the unique contribution of each informant. With a person-centred approach and multi-informant reports (mother, teacher and child), the current study examined 196 children's (age M = 9.21, SD = 1.10, range = 7-11 years; 51% girls) ER patterns and their associations with psychopathological symptoms in a Chinese sample. A model-based clustering procedure resulted in 3 ER groups: the poor family ER group (n = 36), poor school ER group (n = 120), and overall good ER group (n = 40). Significant differences were found among ER clusters on teacher-reported child psychopathological symptoms compared on the levels of withdrawn depression, somatic complain, thought problems and attention problems. No significant differences were found on the mother-reported psychopathological symptoms. Compared with children in the poor school or poor family ER clusters, children in the overall good ER group demonstrated fewer psychopathological symptoms at school. Our results confirmed the advantage of adopting multi-informant assessments to fully capture children's emotional profiles and linked these profiles with children's emotional and behavioural functioning at school.