Parents’ behaviors—particularly their emotion socialization behaviors (ESBs)—drive children’s emotion socialization (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). We propose that a major next step in the effort to promote healthy emotional development is to improve the field’s understanding of the most proximal contributor to parent ESBs: parents’ own experience and regulation of emotions in the context of caregiving. As an initial step, this paper integrates Eisenberg and colleagues’ model of emotion socialization with theoretical and empirical work on parental emotion. We review the literature on the emotionally evocative nature of parenting, which influences parental ESBs, including parents’ expressions of emotions and their responses to children’s emotions. However, whereas parental emotions influence behavior, they do not necessarily determine it; parents may regulate their emotions to engage in optimal ESBs. Thus, parental regulation contributes to emotion socialization not only by modeling emotion regulation strategies for children, but also by influencing the quality of parents’ ESBs. From a clinical perspective, parental emotion regulation is of utmost importance due to the degree of parental involvement in interventions for childhood emotional and behavioral disorders, which are often aimed at promoting child self-regulation. To illustrate practical applications of Eisenberg’s model, we discuss evidence-based practices that include enhancement of parent emotion regulation as a primary target, with the ultimate goal of promoting child emotional development. Ultimately, we aim to spur future theoretical, empirical, and translational work in this area.

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA-axis) reactivity and proactive and reactive aggression in pre-pubertal children. After a 30-min controlled base line period, 73 7-year-old children (40 males and 33 females) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental tasks designed to elicit fear (N = 33) or frustration (N = 32), or a validity check condition (N = 8). This was followed by a 60-min controlled regulation phase. A total of 17 saliva samples for cortisol analysis were collected including 12 post-stress samples at 5-min intervals. Reactive and proactive aggression levels were assessed via the teacher-completed Aggression Behavior Teacher Checklist (Dodge and Coie, J Pers Soc Psychol, 53(6), 1146-1158, 1987). Reactive aggression significantly predicted total and peak post-stress cortisol regardless of stress modality. Proactive aggression was not a predictor of any cortisol index. Examination of pure reactive, proactive, combined, or non-aggressive children indicated that reactive aggressive children had higher cortisol reactivity than proactive and non-aggressive children. Our data suggest that while an overactive HPA-axis response to stress is associated with reactive aggression, stress induced HPA-axis variability does not seem to be related to proactive aggression.

This study demonstrates the unique contributions of perinatal risk and genetic and environmental influences on child behavior using data from 561 domestic US adoption triads (birth mothers, adopted child, and adoptive parents). Findings show distinct patterns of associations among genetic (birth mother psychopathology), prenatal (six maternal reported aggregate scores characterizing total obstetric complications, perinatal internalizing symptoms, pregnancy complications, exposure to toxins, substance use, and neonatal complications), and postnatal influences (adoptive parent 18-month internalizing symptoms and over-reactive parenting) and toddler behavior problems (CBCL subscales at 27 months). Findings highlight multiple pathways for toddler’s behavioral development, including genetic, pregnancy, and postnatal main effects. Findings suggest distinct types of pregnancy risk may transmit genetic influences for specific behavior problems rather than broadband problems.

The purpose of this study was to examine individual differences in the activation and regulation of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) Axis in pre-pubertal children after exposure to two different stress modalities, and to evaluate the utility of an individual differences approach to the examination of HPA-axis functioning. After a 30 minute controlled baseline period, 73 seven-yearold children (40 males and 33 females) were randomly assigned to a validity check condition, or one of two experimental tasks designed to elicit fear or frustration. This was followed by a 60-minute controlled regulation phase. A total of 17 saliva samples were collected, including 12 post-stress samples at 5-minute intervals. There was a significant stress modality effect, with children exposed to the fear condition reaching peak cortisol levels at 25 minutes post-stress, while those exposed to the frustration condition reached peak levels at 45 minutes post-stress. There was no difference in peak cortisol levels between the stress modalities. Individual variability across conditions was significant with subjects reaching peak levels as early as 10 minutes post-stress and as late as 60 minutes post-stress. Our data suggest that analysis of individual curves prior to making group level comparisons may improve the explanatory power of HPA-axis-behavior models. KeywordsCortisol; Stress; HPA; Fear; Frustration; ChildrenThe study of salivary cortisol has been adopted by behavioral researchers interested in examining a wide range of behaviors and disorders, such as depression (Burke, Davis, Otte, & Mohr, 2005), post-traumatic stress disorder (de Kloet et al., 2006), aggression (Gordis, Granger, Susman, & Trickett, 2006), and social anxiety (Beaton, Schmidt, Ashbaugh, Santesso, & Martin, 2006). Researchers have traditionally observed cortisol responses to laboratory stress tasks in order to examine neuroendocrine reactivity. However, most studies, especially those using pediatric populations, have examined HPA-axis responses to social anxiety paradigms © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.1 Please address all correspondence to Nestor L. Lopez-Duran. PhD. University of Michigan. Department of Psychology. 530 Church Street. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043. E-mail: NESTORL@umich.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. and thus our understanding of cortisol responses to different stress modalities is limited. Furthermore, there is a scarcity of research on individual differences in HPA-axis reactivity in children, and extant studies have usually not examined individual differences...

This study examined genetic and environmental influences on harsh parenting of 9-month-olds. We examined whether positive child-, parent-, and family-level characteristics were associated with harsh parenting in addition to negative characteristics. We were particularly interested in examining evocative gene-environment correlation (rGE) by testing the effect of birth parent temperament on adoptive parents’ harsh parenting. Additionally, we examined associations among adoptive parents’ own temperaments, their marital relationship quality, and harsh parenting. Adoptive fathers’ (but not adoptive mothers’) harsh parenting was inversely related to an index of birth mother positive temperament (reward dependence), indicating evocative rGE. Higher marital quality was associated with less harsh parenting, but only for adoptive fathers. Adoptive parents’ negative temperamental characteristics (harm avoidance) were related to hostile parenting. Findings suggest the importance of enhancing positive family characteristics in addition to mitigating negative characteristics, as well as engaging multiple levels of the family system to prevent harsh parenting.