Maternal and Temperamental Influences on Children's Emotion Regulation

Toddler-aged children are expected to shift from being solely dependent on parents to regulate their emotion (e.g., Fox & Calkins, 2003) to being able to independently regulate their emotions (Calkins & Johnson, 1998). Mothers' responses to children's negative emotions are expected to influence this development. Children's temperamental negative reactivity was found to moderate the effect of mothers' socialization attempts on children's regulatory behaviors, as suggested by previous theoretical and empirical work (e.g., Putnam, Sanson, & Rothbart, 2002; Rothbart & Bates, 1998). Specifically, highly negatively reactive children showed no correspondence between their mothers' attention-shifting strategies and their own attentionshifting regulation behaviors. This finding is consistent with the proposed process by which temperamentally reactive children become overaroused and unreceptive to mothers' socialization efforts (Hoffman, 1983; Scaramella & Leve, 2004). Lastly, children's reactivity did not moderate the effects of mothers' emotion-intensifying socialization on children's emotion-intensifying regulation behaviors, a finding which deserves further study.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Year

2006

Author dc:creator

• Mirabile, Scott

Contributors dc:contributor

• Scaramella, Laura
• Morris, Amanda
• Frick, Paul

• Emotion regulation
• Mother-child interaction
• Attention-shifting
• Emotion-focused
• Emotion-intensifying
• Low-income
• African American
• Preschool

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/370

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-1391