Cognition and emotion: Family member similarity and intergenerational transmission.

Abstract

C hildren arrive in the world ready for cognitive and affective action and experience. Over time, they will develop into full-fledged cognitive regulators of their emotions. Guiding each child through this developmental journey is a set of experiences integrated with biological mechanisms. As individuals, children differ from each other in that biology (some aspects of which they are born with, e.g., structural differences in their genotypes) and in what they experience-even within the same household. These distinct influences work together within a family context and set of relationships. Our emphasis in the current chapter is that each person in the family is unique but that there also are clear patterns of family member resemblance (i.e., observed similarity) arising from familial transmission (i.e., causal mechanisms involving biological-environmental transactions) of cognitive and affective components of emotion regulation. We present examples of research on familial resemblance and transmission involving two cognitive emotion regulation processes: effortful control (EC) and executive functioning (EF), and their connections with negative emotions-anger/frustration and fearfulness in particular. Examining family member resemblance and transmission processes allows scientists to operationalize mechanisms more precisely and infer potential causal effects more accurately, which in turn informs improvements to prevention and intervention efforts.