In considering Bowlby's (1969/1982) conceptualization of attachment as a "biobehavioral safety-regulating system," Goldberg, Grusec, & Jenkins (1999) proposed that maternal sensitivity to infant distress may be particularly relevant to the formation of a secure attachment relationship. Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care provided a unique opportunity to address this question as maternal sensitivity to nondistress and distress were each coded for 357 mother-infant dyads at 6 months and 230 dyads at 15 months from videotaped observations of mother-infant play sessions. Attachment security was assessed in the Strange Situation at 15 months. Logistic regression analyses indicated that greater sensitivity to distress (but not greater sensitivity to nondistress) at 6 months was associated with increased odds of being classified as secure. The 15-month sensitivity measures were nonsignificant predictors of security. The results support the notion that the protective function of the child-mother attachment relationship may be especially salient during early infancy.
Mother-and father-reported reactions to children's negative emotions were examined as correlates of emotional understanding (Study 1, N = 55, 5-to 6-year-olds) and friendship quality (Study 2, N = 49, 3-to 5-year-olds). Mothers' and fathers' supportive reactions together contributed to greater child-friend coordinated play during a sharing task. Further, when one parent reported low support, greater support by the other parent was related to better understanding of emotions and less intense conflict with friends (for boys only). When one parent reported high support, however, greater support by the other parent was associated with less optimal functioning on these outcomes. Results partially support the notion that children benefit when parents differ in their reactions to children's emotions.How parents respond to their children's emotional displays, especially those involving negative affect, has important implications for children's socioemotional functioning (Dunsmore & Halberstadt, 1997;Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998;Gottman, Katz & Hooven, 1996;Parke, 1994). Parental reactions that are punitive or dismissing may impede children's ability to regulate physiological arousal (Gottman et al., 1996;Eisenberg, Fabes, & Murphy, 1996) and process information about emotional events (Gottman et al., 1996;Hoffman, 1983), and may also lead children to view emotions as threatening, avoid emotionally challenging situations, and ultimately miss opportunities to learn about and cope with negative emotions (Eisenberg et al., 1998). In contrast, parental responses to children's negative emotions that provide instrumental (e.g., problem-solving) or emotional (e.g., comforting) support are hypothesized to foster social and emotional competence through the child's openness to explore emotional events and meanings, the ability to regulate arousal, and focus and shift attention to emotional stimuli in appropriate ways (Eisenberg et al., 1998;Gottman et al., 1996).Studies of parental reactions to children's emotions have typically been conducted with mothers only, despite calls for greater attention to the larger family system (Cowan, 1996;Parke & McDowell, 1998) and suggestions in the literature that fathers may play a unique role in children's socioemotional development (Parke, 1994;Roberts & Strayer, 1987;Rohner & Correspondence concerning this manuscript may be addressed to the first author at the Department of Human and Community Development, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 904 W. Nevada Street, Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail: mcelwn@uiuc.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptChild Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2008 October 7. Published in final edited form as:Child Dev. 2007 ; 78(5): 1407-1425. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01074.x. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript Veneziano, 2001;Volling, McElwain, Notaro, & Herrera, 2002). When studies have included fathers, associations between parental reactions and child outcomes have been examined separately for...
Jealousy is a social emotion that has received little attention by developmental researchers. The current study examined sibling jealousy and its relations to child and family characteristics in 60 families with a 16-month-old toddler and an older preschool-age sibling. Sibling jealousy was elicited in social triads consisting of a parent (mother or father) and the two siblings. Positive marital relationship quality (i.e., love and relationship maintenance) was a particularly strong predictor of the older siblings' abilities to regulate jealousy reactions in the mother sessions. Younger siblings' jealous affect with mothers was linked to the child's temperament, whereas older siblings' jealous affect with mothers was related to the child's emotional understanding. Younger siblings displayed more behavioral dysregulation in the mother-sibling triads if there was greater sibling rivalry reported by mothers. Session order (i.e., which sibling was challenged first in the jealousy paradigm) had a strong effect on both the affect and behavioral dysregulation displayed by the older and younger siblings. Results are discussed with respect to the need for future research to consider social relationships as developmental contexts for young children's emotion regulation.
One-year-old infants (N = 62) and their mothers and fathers were observed in free play and teaching sessions in order to examine parents' emotional availability and the infant's emotional competence. Mothers were more emotionally available than fathers, and infants exhibited more effortful attention with mothers than with fathers. Similar relations between parental emotional availability and infant emotional competence were found for mother-infant and father-infant dyads. Change in parental emotional availability covaried with change in infant emotional competence. Individual differences in parental emotional availability and infant emotional competence were more consistent across contexts than across parents. Infant effortful attention at 12 months was a mediator between maternal emotional availability at 12 months and toddler situational compliance at 16 months.
The present research examined parental beliefs about children's negative emotions, parent-reported marital conflict/ambivalence, and child negative emotionality and gender as predictors of mothers' and fathers' reported reactions to their kindergarten children's negative emotions and self-expressiveness in the family (N = 55, two-parent families). Models predicting parents' nonsupportive reactions and negative expressiveness were significant. For both mothers and fathers, more accepting beliefs about children's negative emotions were associated with fewer nonsupportive reactions, and greater marital conflict/ambivalence was associated with more negative expressiveness. Furthermore, interactions between child negative emotionality and parental resources (e.g., marital conflict/ambivalence; accepting beliefs) emerged for fathers' nonsupportive reactions and mothers' negative expressiveness. In some instances, child gender acted as a moderator such that associations between parental beliefs about emotions and the emotion socialization outcomes emerged when child and parent gender were concordant.
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