The Value of a Smile: Child Positive Affect Moderates Relations Between Maternal Emotion Dysregulation and Child Adjustment Problems

Abstract

Little is known about how processes underlying maternal psychopathology, such as emotion dysregulation, are related to children's adjustment problems. Further, scant research has explored child protective factors that can buffer these associations. We used a multi-method approach to examine whether child positive affect functions as a protective and/or promotive factor in the context of maternal emotion dysregulation in a cross-sectional sample of 95 mothers (M age = 30.38 years, SD = 6.10) and their preschool-age children (M age = 3.52 years, SD = .52). We assessed maternal emotion dysregulation using respiratory sinus arrhythmia data and a self-report measure. Mothers reported on their children's positive affect as well as their internalizing and externalizing behaviors. Results yielded significant bivariate relations between maternal self-reported emotion dysregulation and children's internalizing and externalizing problems. Moderation analyses indicated that high child positive affect facilitated adjustment across both internalizing and externalizing domains when maternal physiological emotion dysregulation was low. In addition, high child positive affect facilitated adjustment in the internalizing domain when self-reported maternal emotion dysregulation was low. The identification of factors contributing to adjustment problems during the preschool period is crucial given the potential for the prevention of long-term maladaptation, and our results suggest that child positive affect and maternal emotion dysregulation may be important targets for prevention and intervention work.

A Model‐Based Cluster Analysis of Maternal Emotion Regulation and Relations to Parenting Behavior

“…As mother's race, marital status, and education significantly differed among clusters, a composite risk variable was created to serve as a covariate, by dichotomizing and summing each variable (see Davis et al., ). Post hoc ANCOVAs were conducted to examine cluster differences in parenting after accounting for these contextual variables.…”

“…Emotional responses comprise subjective feelings, observable behaviors, and physiological responses, and regulation includes both conscious/voluntary and unconscious processes (Gross, ). Currently, there are many ways to measure ER (e.g., self‐ and informant reports, psychophysiological assessments, behavioral observations) and concordance across different levels of analysis is inconsistent (Calkins & Dedmon, ; Davis, Suveg, & Shaffer, ). These divergent findings make it difficult to decipher how individual components of the broader ER construct fit together to inform us about key psychosocial processes for parents and children.…”

Mothers’ self‐reported emotion dysregulation: A potentially valid method in the field of infant mental health

“…Somewhat similarly, Davis et al. (2015) reported that mothers’ RSA suppression from baseline to a speech task in which they described their parenting philosophy was not significantly associated with their reports on the DERS ( r = −.08); and only the DERS predicted mothers reports of their preschoolers’ behavior problems.…”

“…Likewise, although results of basic research studies have demonstrated associations between elevated DERS scores and less adaptive parenting and child outcomes (Carreras, Carter, Heberle, Forbes, & Gray, 2019; Sarıtaş, Grusec, & Gençöz, 2013; Shaffer & Obradovic, 2017), this research has focused on parents of preschool aged or older children and has often utilized self‐reported indices of parenting (e.g., Jones, Brett, Ehrlich, Lejuez, & Cassidy, 2014; Morelen, Shaffer, & Suveg, 2016) and mother‐reported child outcomes (e.g., Davis, Suveg, & Shaffer, 2015; Morelen et al., 2016) which suffer also from shared source variance. Thus, there is a need to determine if mothers’ reports on the DERS correlate with observed indices of parenting and child outcomes during infancy.…”

Interplay between children’s biobehavioral plasticity and interparental relationship in the origins of internalizing problems.

“…Meta-analyses demonstrate a large effect of (low) positive affectivity on internalizing disorders (Kotov, Gamez, Schmidt, & Watson, 2010), especially depression (Klein, Dyson, Kujawa, & Kotov, 2012). Interest in the role of positive affectivity in developmental psychopathology has been on the rise, and both main effects and interactions with environmental factors have been proposed (Davis & Suveg, 2014; Davis, Suveg, & Shaffer, 2015; Wills, Sandy, Yaeger, & Shinar, 2001). Thus, children whose positive affectivity is dampened might be differentially susceptible to their environments.…”