When is reappraisal – reframing a situation’s meaning to alter its emotional impact – associated with psychological health? To answer this question, we should consider that reappraisal is a multi-component process that includes, first, deciding to attempt to use reappraisal and, second, implementing reappraisal with varying degrees of success. Although theories of emotion regulation suggest that both attempting reappraisal more frequently and implementing reappraisal more successfully are necessary to achieve greater psychological health, no research has directly tested this assumption. We propose that daily diaries are particularly well-suited to assess these two components because diaries can capture repeated attempts and success in daily life and with relative precision. In a sample of community adults (N=219), we found that among participants experiencing elevated life stress (but not among those experiencing lower life stress), attempting reappraisal more frequently was associated with fewer depressive symptoms for those who used reappraisal more successfully, but was associated with somewhat more depressive symptoms for those who used reappraisal less successfully. These findings suggest that attempting reappraisal is associated with benefits only when individuals can implement it successfully. Thus, to fully understand the health implications of emotion regulation, we must consider it as a multi-component process.
Mothers and their babies represent one of the closest dyadic units and thus provide a powerful paradigm to examine how affective states are shared, and result in, synchronized physiologic responses between two people. We recruited mothers and their 12- to 14-month-old infants (Ndyads = 98) to complete a lab study in which mothers were initially separated from their infants and assigned to either a low-arousal positive/relaxation condition, intended to elicit parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) reactivity, or a high-arousal negative/stress task, intended to elicit sympathetic nervous system (SNS) reactivity. Upon reunion, infants were placed either on their mothers’ laps (touch condition) or in a high chair next to the mother (no-touch condition). We then examined if the babies SNS and/or PNS responses changed from their baseline levels and how the dyads’ physiological responses – both PNS and SNS responses – synchronized over time as a function of mothers’ affect manipulation and touch condition. Three noteworthy findings were observed. Firstly, infants of mothers assigned to the relaxation task showed greater PNS increases and PNS covariation. Secondly, infants of mothers assigned to the stress task showed stronger SNS covariation with their mothers over time. Finally, infants who sat on their mothers’ laps (i.e., touch condition) showed stronger SNS covariation than those in the no-touch condition. Taken together, these results suggest that mothers’ affective states – low-arousal positive states as well as high-arousal negative states – can be “caught” by their infants, and that touch can play a critical role in stress contagion.
Parents can influence children’s emotional responses through direct and subtle behavior. In this study we examined how parents’ acute stress responses might be transmitted to their 7- to 11-year-old children and how parental emotional suppression would affect parents’ and children’s physiological responses and behavior. Parents and their children (N = 214; Ndyads = 107; 47% fathers) completed a laboratory visit where we initially separated the parents and children and subjected the parent to a standardized laboratory stressor that reliably activates the body’s primary stress systems. Before reuniting with their children, parents were randomly assigned to either suppress their affective state—hide their emotions from their child—or to act naturally (control condition). Once reunited, parents and children completed a conflict conversation and two interaction tasks together. We measured their sympathetic nervous system (SNS) responses and observed interaction behavior. We obtained three key findings: (a) suppressing mothers’ SNS responses influenced their child’s SNS responses; (b) suppressing fathers’ SNS responses were influenced by their child’s SNS responses; and (c) dyads with suppressing parents appeared less warm and less engaged during interaction than control dyads. These findings reveal that parents’ emotion regulation efforts impact parent–child stress transmission and compromise interaction quality. Discussion focuses on short-term and long-term consequences of parental emotion regulation and children’s social-emotional development.
Parents often try to hide their negative emotions from their kids, hoping to protect them from experiencing adverse responses. However, suppression has been linked with poor social interactions. Suppression may be particularly damaging in the context of parent-child relationships because it may hinder parents' ability to support children's emotion regulation. Immediately after completing a stressful task, 109 parents of 7 to 11 year olds were randomly assigned to a suppression condition or a control condition during an interaction with their child. Children were given a set of instructions with pictures to build a Lego house and told to verbally instruct their parent without touching the Legos themselves. Trained research assistants coded parents' and children's positive and negative mood, responsiveness, warmth, parents' guidance, and the quality of the interaction. We found that suppression decreased parents' observed positive mood, responsiveness, warmth, and guidance, as well as children's observed positive mood, responsiveness, and warmth, and decreased the overall dyadic interaction quality. However, parent sex played a significant role in moderating these effects. Fathers in the suppression condition were less responsive and warm than control fathers, though children interacting with their fathers did not exhibit decrements in responsiveness or warmth. In contrast, children of suppressing mothers appeared less warm than children of mothers in the control condition, though suppressing mothers did not exhibit decrements in their observed warmth or responsiveness relative to control mothers. Taken together, these findings suggest that the desire to hide one's feelings from one's children may have unwanted negative consequences but may differ for fathers versus mothers.
How do people come to know others' feelings? One idea is that affective processes (e.g., physiological responses) play an important role, leading to the prediction that linkage between one's physiological responses and others' emotions relates to one's ability to know how others feel (i.e., empathic accuracy). Participants (N = 96, 48 female friend pairs) completed a stressful speech task and then provided continuous ratings of their own (as "targets") and their friend's (as "perceivers") emotional experience for the video-taped speeches. We measured physiology-physiology linkage (linkage between perceivers' and targets' physiology), physiology-experience linkage (linkage between perceivers' physiology and targets' experience), and empathic accuracy (linkage between perceivers' ratings of targets' experience and targets' ratings of their experience). Physiology-experience (but not physiology-physiology) linkage was associated with greater empathic accuracy even when controlling for key potential confounds (random linkage, targets' and perceivers' emotional reactivity, and relationship closeness). Results suggest that physiological responses play a role in empathic accuracy.
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