Socialization of emotion and offspring internalizing symptoms in mothers with childhood-onset depression

Abstract

This study examines how mothers with and without a history of childhood-onset depression respond to their 3–9 year-old children’s emotions. Mother-child dyads included 55 offspring of mothers with a history of childhood-onset depressive disorders and 57 offspring of never-depressed mothers. Mothers with a history of childhood depression were less likely than were control mothers to respond in supportive ways to their children’s negative emotions and were more likely to magnify, punish, or neglect their children’s negative emotions. Magnification, neglect, and punishment of children’s negative emotions were concurrently associated with children’s internalizing symptoms, and neglect and punishment were associated with internalizing over a one year follow-up. Maternal neglect of children’s negative emotion was positively associated with later internalizing symptoms for children who already had higher internalizing symptoms at the initial assessment. Findings suggest that atypical socialization of emotion may be one mechanism in the development of internalizing disorders.

Early Childhood Teachers as Socializers of Young Children’s Emotional Competence

“…Both middle-and low-income preschoolers' emotion regulation is facilitated by their mothers' appropriate expressiveness (Eisenberg et al 2003). In contrast, exposure to parental negativity may over-arouse children just learning to regulate emotions, and gives them hostile or sad templates for reacting emotionally to people and events (Luebbe et al 2011;Silk et al 2011). In fact, positive and negative maternal emotions contribute to children's emotion regulation, which predicted concurrent and later social functioning (Eisenberg et al 2003;Valiente et al 2004).…”

New version of the emotion socialization scale with the positive emotion of overjoy: initial validation evidence with Portuguese adolescents

“…Two additional results regarding NE are worth analyzing. Like in previous research (Klimes-Dougan et al 2007;O'Neal & Magai, 2005;Silk et al 2011), the punish scales (NE) emerged with lower levels of internal consistency. Furthermore, we found an unexpected positive relation with emotional warmth and non-significant relations with rejection (while positive with overprotection).…”

“You Get Angry Inside Yourself”: Low-Income Adolescent South African Girls’ Subjective Experience of Depression

“…Studies have shown that homes with a depressed mother are more violent, hostile, and filled with conflict, than those without a depressed parent (Kohl, Kagotho & Dixon, 2011;Silk, Shaw, Prout, O'Rourke, Lane & Kovacs, 2011). Family situations of anger, conflict, and punishment of the children may increase the risk of a child becoming depressed (Flykt, Kanninen, Sinkkonen & Punnamäki, 2010;Rishel, 2012;Turney, 2012;Watson, Potts, Hardcastle, Forehand & Compas, 2012).…”