Examining the Impacts of a Relational Savoring Intervention on Parental Reflective Functioning and Children’s Emotion Regulation Across Time

<p>The ability to regulate emotions is an important competency that enables goal attainment and maintenance of satisfying interpersonal relationships throughout life. Key to the development of healthy emotion regulation is the sensitivity of the caregiver. One internal mechanism underlying parents’ ability to be sensitive is parental reflective functioning, the ability to understand a child as having a complex inner world of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that serve as the basis for the child’s behaviors. Strong parental reflective functioning allows parents to understand the needs behind children’s behavior and respond sensitively to meet those needs. The sensitive parenting that depends on parental reflective functioning supports effective emotion regulation skills that will serve children throughout life. One promising avenue to promote parental reflective functioning is Relational Savoring, an intervention which asks parents to focus on memories of connective moments with their child. It is believed that Relational Savoring will promote parents' reflective functioning. As a result, their children should reap benefits in the form of improved emotion regulation via more sensitive and responsive parenting. The present study used a randomized controlled trial to examine the longitudinal impact of a Relational Savoring intervention on a community sample of mothers and their toddler and preschool-aged children across three data collection waves. At both post-intervention time points (three months and two years later), relational savoring appears to have promoted mothers’ interest and curiosity about their child’s inner states. Further, at the three-month follow-up, despite receiving no intervention themselves, children whose mothers experienced the relational savoring intervention displayed greater emotion regulation abilities. These impacts provide evidence that relational savoring offers benefits for the relationship between mothers and their children, and to augment the development of children’s emotion regulation capacities, supporting positive long-term outcomes for children.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Psychology, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation

Year dc:date.available

2024

Author dc:creator

• Blackard, Megan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Patricia Smiley
• Saida Heshmati
• Tiffany Berry

• Emotion Regulation
• Mentalizing
• Parental Reflective Functioning
• Parenting
• Relational Savoring
• Savoring
• Developmental Psychology

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/824

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1847