Parental Emotion Socialization Predicts Early Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation: A Longitudinal and Multimethod Examination in Trauma-Exposed Families

Abstract

Bolstering emerging adolescents’ emotion regulation may help promote resilience to emotional disorders. This may be especially critical among offspring of parents who have experienced trauma, who are at increased risk of mental health problems. This study examines the influence of parental emotion socialization on emerging adolescents’ behavioral and physiological regulation. Thirty-two parents who experienced interpersonal trauma and their 9- to 12-year-old emerging adolescents (M_ageT1 = 10.8 years; M_ageT2 = 11.5 years) completed reports of parental emotion socialization behaviors at baseline, and reports of youth’s emotion coping, emotionally dysregulated behaviors, and affective symptoms at follow-up. Youth’s RSA reactivity was also assessed. Parents’ unsupportive responses predicted youth’s behavioral dysregulation and less adaptive physiological regulation, and parents’ supportive responses predicted youth’s coping behaviors. Youth’s behavioral and physiological regulation was concurrently associated with their affective symptoms. These findings suggest that parental emotion socialization plays a critical role in emerging adolescents’ physiological and behavioral regulation.

Keywords

emotion socialization emotion regulation physiological regulation emerging adolescence trauma

Introduction

There is a well-documented heightened risk for emotional disorders during adolescence (Merikangas et al., 2010; Steinberg, 2005). Given this fact, emerging adolescence - the years leading up to and including early adolescence, which we define as 9–12 years of age - is arguably a critical time to preventatively focus on the enhancement of emotion regulation, which is associated with more optimal psychological outcomes (Daniel et al., 2020) and promotes resilience to a range of risk factors. This may be especially critical among offspring of parents who have experienced interpersonal trauma, for whom risk of trauma and mental health problems are greatly increased (Plant et al., 2018; Schickedanz et al., 2018). Yet limited research examining predictors of youth’s emotion regulation during emerging adolescence is available to inform clinical interventions, and even less is known about these processes within families affected by trauma. A better understanding of these processes has the potential to bolster youth’s regulatory capacities, during a developmental stage when they are particularly vulnerable to risk factors (Steinberg, 2005), thereby reducing the intergenerational transmission of mental health risk associated with parental trauma exposure.

Emerging adolescents’ growing ability to regulate their emotions adaptively is influenced by parenting practices related to the socialization of emotion, including how parents’ respond to their offspring’s emotional displays (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Gunzenhauser et al., 2014; Morris et al., 2011). While much of this work has been conducted with younger children, parental supportive (i.e., responses that validate or attend to children’s emotions) and unsupportive (i.e., those that exacerbate or punish children’s emotions) responses continue to influence emotional functioning and psychosocial outcomes throughout adolescence (Bariola et al., 2011; Kehoe et al., 2014; Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007). Although emotion socialization is understudied in trauma-exposed parents, emerging science suggests that parents with a history of maltreatment are at greater risk for engaging in fewer supportive and more unsupportive responses to their older children’s and emerging adolescents’ negative emotions (Cabecinha-Alati et al., 2021; Choi & Kang, 2021; Rea & Shaffer, 2016). Thus, shedding light on pathways between parents’ emotion socialization (ES) behaviors and emerging adolescents’ emotion regulation capacities may point to important points of intervention for trauma-affected families, and thereby help to mitigate impairment for this high risk group of youth. However, examinations of the associations between parents’ ES and their offspring’s emotion regulation are often conducted cross-sectionally and therefore do not inform directional conclusions regarding the influence of parents’ supportive and unsupportive responses on offspring’s emotional regulation capacities. Indeed, a mere handful of studies examine these relationships longitudinally; even fewer with emerging adolescents.

The current study examines these processes in a heterogenous sample of emerging adolescents at high risk of emotion dysregulation secondary to their parent’s and/or their own traumatic experiences. It leverages a longitudinal, multi-informant, multi-measure design including parent- and youth-reports of parents’ supportive and unsupportive responses to their offspring’s negative emotions, parent- and youth-reports of youth’s emotion coping and dysregulation behaviors, and youth’s physiological regulation, indexed by youth’s respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity (RSA-R) during a stressful task.

Emotion Regulation and Socialization

Emotion regulation consists of a multidimensional set of strategies employed to control the timing, duration, and intensity with which one’s emotions are experienced and expressed, involving both behavioral and physiological components (Dvir et al., 2014; Gross, 1998; Mende-Siedlecki et al., 2012). Despite its complexity, a majority of studies focus on the presence or absence of behavioral indicators of emotional dysregulation, and fail to include indicators of emotional regulation (Cole et al., 2004). The current study measures youth’s emotion coping and dysregulation behaviors separately to examine unique patterns between parents’ ES practices and these discrete aspects of emotion regulation.

Research using behavioral measures of emotion regulation indicates that continuing into adolescence, supportive ES responses tend to be associated with the development of emotional competence and regulation (McKee et al., 2022; Rogers et al., 2016) and unsupportive responses with inhibited emotional expression and emotion lability (Kehoe et al., 2014; McKee et al., 2022). However, despite discordance between parent and youth reports of parenting behaviors (Hou et al., 2020), these studies rely on parents’ reports of their ES, and neglect youth’s perspectives of their parents’ behavior. To explore the potential discrepancy between parent- and youth-reported ES, we include both in the current study.

Physiological Regulation and Socialization

Notably, few studies examine the influence of parents’ ES on youth’s physiological self-regulation during emotion evocation, although these patterns may differ from behavioral indicators. Indeed, two studies with non-trauma-affected families with younger children have identified unique relationships between parental ES and adult-reported child behavioral emotion regulation and children’s autonomic reactivity (Breaux et al., 2018; Perry et al., 2020), underscoring the importance of measuring both physiological and behavioral regulation.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is critical to coping with and regulating arousal during environmental challenge through the balance of sympathetic (SNS) activation, preparing for “fight or flight,” and parasympathetic activation (PNS), which promotes homeostasis and is indexed by RSA. When confronted with challenge, disengagement of the PNS, reflected by withdrawal of RSA, facilitates attentional and behavioral control and activation of sympathetic response. Thus, RSA withdrawal during challenge is thought to reflect an adaptive marshalling of resources to regulate one’s emotional response. Consistent with this framing, meta-analytic research indicates that among children and youth, RSA withdrawal during a cognitive stressor is associated with fewer externalizing, internalizing, and social problems, whereas lower levels of RSA withdrawal or RSA augmentation are observed among clinical or at-risk samples (Graziano & Derefinko, 2013). Among youth who have experienced traumatic events and high marital conflict, RSA withdrawal has been shown to protect against psychopathology, suggesting that this physiological response may be more adaptive among high-risk populations (El-Sheikh & Erath, 2011; McLaughlin et al., 2014).

Within the small corpus of research examining the predictive effect of parents’ ES on their offspring’s physiological regulation, few studies examine these associations among older children and adolescents. However, preliminary research suggests that parents’ unsupportive responses to negative emotions are associated with less RSA withdrawal during a stressor in this age group (Perry et al., 2020; Williams & Woodruff-Borden, 2015). Notably, there were no direct effects between supportive ES and youth’s RSA reactivity in either of these studies.

Current Study

We used a multi-informant, multi-method, longitudinal design to evaluate the association of parental supportive and unsupportive responses to youth’s negative emotions and youth’s emotional and physiological regulation. We included both parent and youth reports of parents’ ES to capture individual perspectives on parents’ responses. We also included multi-method assessment of youth’s regulation, including parent and youth reports of youth’s emotion coping and emotionally dysregulated behaviors, as well as youth’s RSA reactivity assessed during a cognitive challenge. We conceptualized that RSA withdrawal would reflect an adaptive response to the stressful nature of the task (Graziano & Derefinko, 2013). We therefore hypothesized that RSA increases from baseline to task (RSA augmentation) would be reflective of poorer physiological emotion regulation and thus would be associated concurrently with higher self- and parent-reports of youth’s affective symptoms (anger, anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress). We also hypothesized that unsupportive ES at Time 1 (T1) would be associated with youth’s less adaptive, and supportive ES with youth’s more adaptive, emotion regulation at Time 2 (T2), across measurement approaches (parent- and youth-reports of emotion coping and emotionally dysregulated behaviors, and RSA reactivity).

Method

Participants

Participants were parents in the Northeastern United States who had experienced interpersonal trauma and their 9- to 12-year old emerging adolescents, recruited from the community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Parental interpersonal trauma was assessed with the Structured Trauma-Related Experiences and Symptoms Screener (Grasso et al., 2019). Youth with significant cognitive delays or neurocognitive conditions and non-English-speaking youth and parents were excluded. Forty-seven families completed baseline surveys remotely at T1 (see procedures) and thirty-two (68%) families completed the follow-up visit at T2. Participants who did not complete the follow-up visit did not differ from those who did on parent or youth age, ethnicity, race, or number of traumatic events experienced; family income; parent and youth ratings of T1 youth’s coping and dysregulation; or parent and youth ratings of T1 parents’ emotion socialization. Participant descriptive statistics are presented in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1.

Demographic Characteristics of the Study Sample.

Characteristics	n = 32
Parental age (years), M (SD)
Time 1	40.6 (6.8)
Time 2	41.2 (7.0)
Parental gender, n (%)
Female	31 (96.9)
Male	1 (3.1)
Parental marital status, n (%)
Single	10 (31.3)
Divorced, separated, or widowed	10 (31.3)
Married	10 (31.3)
Parental race/ethnicity, n (%)
Non-Hispanic European American	18 (56.3)
Non-Hispanic African American	6 (18.8)
Non-Hispanic Asian American	2 (6.3)
Hispanic other race	3 (9.4)
Hispanic European American	2 (6.3)
Hispanic African American	1 (3.1)
Family income, n (%)
$0–20,999	6 (18.8)
$21,000–40,999	9 (28.2)
$41,000-60,999	3 (9.4)
$61,000–100,000	5 (15.7)
$100,000 +	9 (28.1)
Youth age (years), M (SD)
Time 1	10.8 (1.2)
Time 2	11.5 (1.3)
Youth gender, n (%)
Female	20 (62.5)
Male	11 (34.4)
Other	1 (3.1)
Youth race/ethnicity, n (%)
Non-Hispanic European American	16 (50.0)
Non-Hispanic African American	5 (15.6)
Non-Hispanic Asian American	2 (6.3)
Hispanic European American	4 (12.5)
Hispanic African American	2 (6.3)
Hispanic multiracial or other race	3 (9.4)

Table 2.

Trauma Characteristics of the Study Sample.

	Mothers n (%)	Youth n (%)
Type of trauma experienced
Sexual Abuse/Assault	12 (37.5%)	3 (9.4%)
Physical Abuse/Assault	22 (68.8%)	3 (9.4%)
Psychological violence	15 (46.9%)	11 (34.4%)
Witness violence	18 (56.3%)	8 (25.0%)
Neglect	0 (0%)	6 (18.8%)
Attachment trauma	28 (87.5%)	22 (68.8%)
Loss	31 (96.9%)	9 (28.1%)
Medical trauma	17 (53.1%)	9 (28.1%)
Disaster, war, or other trauma	25 (78.1%)	14 (43.8%)
Number of categories of trauma types experienced
0 Categories	0 (0%)	2 (6.3%)
1 Category	2 (6.3%)	8 (25.0%)
2 Categories	1 (3.1%)	8 (25.0%)
3 Categories	4 (12.5%)	3 (9.4%)
4 Categories	6 (18.8%)	7 (21.9%)
5 Categories	4 (12.5%)	2 (6.3%)
6 Categories	6 (18.8%)	0 (0%)
7+ Categories	9 (21.1%)	2 (6.3%)

Procedures

Surveys

All procedures were approved by the [UConn Health Institutional Review Board] Institutional Review Board. T1 study questionnaires, informed consent/assent, and HIPAA authorization were completed remotely due to COVID-19 restrictions. Parents completed surveys on-line and youth completed questionnaires with a research team member using a secure video conference platform. Completion of T2 questionnaires, a puzzle challenge task, and psychophysiology data collection took place at an in-person follow-up lab visit scheduled with families once COVID restrictions had eased (time between visits M = 10.4 months, SD = 3.4).

Psychophysiological Data

Physiological data was acquired while youth completed the Performance Challenge Task (PCT; Borelli et al., 2018), a standardized laboratory cognitive challenge consisting of computer presentation of six unsolvable 3 × 3 geometric puzzles, designed to invoke performance failure and negative social comparisons. For each puzzle, the youth was presented with a picture, an empty 9-square grid and 10 tiles and given 30s to move the tiles into the empty grid to recreate the picture; however, only 8 of the nine correct pieces are presented, making the puzzle impossible to complete. Between puzzles, two progress bars appear that compare the youth’s performance to the better performance of “most kids.” The puzzles were completed by the youth with their parent present. Parents were instructed to let youth complete the puzzle but were otherwise allowed to respond to their youth during the task with the goal of creating an autonomic assessment that more closely resembles interactions that might happen outside of the lab environment. At the completion of the puzzle task, the dyad was debriefed about the task and the youth received a prize.

Data reduction, and analysis were conducted using MindWare hardware and software. Electrocardiogram (ECG) data were recorded using Ag/AgCl electrodes placed in a modified lead II configuration. Following the visit, ECG data were visually inspected by trained researchers who corrected misidentified beats due to movement and measurement artifacts. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was derived using spectral analysis of interbeat intervals (IBI). High-frequency heart rate variability was extracted within the frequency band associated with respiration (0.24–1.04 Hz), validated with participants’ respiration. RSA was extracted in 60s epochs for all epochs with fewer than 5% estimated R-peaks. Subsequently, 60s epoch values were averaged within the 3-minute baseline (while youth sat quietly watching a scenic video) and within the 5-minute puzzle task. Following accepted guidelines (Beauchaine et al., 2019), RSA-reactivity (RSA-R) was calculated as a difference score (Task RSA minus Baseline RSA), such that positive RSA-R values reflect RSA augmentation and negative RSA-R values reflect RSA withdrawal.

Parent- and Youth-Report Measures

Time 1 Emotion Socialization

Parents and youth rated parents’ emotion socialization using the Emotions as a Child Scale (EAC; Magai, 1996). Each informant rated parents’ typical responses to their child’s negative emotions (anger, sadness, and fear) on a 5-point scale (1–5). The 45-item EAC is widely used and well-validated (Guo et al., 2017; Silk et al., 2011). Following Guo et al. (2017), we divided responses into two factors: the Supportive Parenting Response Scale (parent α = .88; youth α = .93) and the Unsupportive Parenting Response Scale (parent α = .83; youth α = .83).

Time 2 Youth Emotion Regulation

Youth Emotion Management

The Child Emotion Management Scales – Anger, Sadness, and Worry (Zeman et al., 2001, 2010) was used to assess parent- and youth reports of the youth’s emotion dysregulation (parent α = .70; youth α = .70) and emotion coping behaviors (parent α = .87; youth α = .83). Reliability on the emotion dysregulation scale was initially low (parent α = .66; youth α = .57); however, removal of 2 problematic items from the parent report and 3 from the youth report increased it to the acceptable level reported above.

Time 2 Youth Symptoms

Youth Affective Symptoms

Parents and youth rated youths’ affective symptoms using the PROMIS Pediatric Health Scales (Irwin et al., 2010). The 5-item Pediatric Anger, 8-item Pediatric Anxiety and 8-item Pediatric Depression Scales were each rated on a 5-point scale (1–5). (Parent report: anger α = .93, depression α = .88, anxiety α = .88; Youth report: anger α = .79, depression α = .87, anxiety, α = .91).

Youth Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms

Youth’s posttraumatic stress symptoms were assessed via parent report with the Structured Trauma-Related Experiences & Symptoms Screener (STRESS; Grasso et al., 2015). Parents reported on youth’s traumatic experiences and, if at least one event was endorsed, they were asked how often in the past week the youth had experienced each of the DSM-5 symptoms, from ‘No days’ (0) to ‘Most days’ (4). Nearly all youth (91%) were reported to have experienced at least 1 traumatic or neglectful event. Reliability of the 21-item STRESS symptoms in the current sample was good (α = .87).

Analytic Plan

Youth’s age, gender, race, and ethnicity; parents’ age, education, race, and ethnicity; and family income were examined in relation to variables of interest. Pearson correlations were used to examine bivariate parent- and youth-reports of youth’s symptoms’ associations with T2 youth emotional and physiological regulation. Hypothesized predictive associations among T1 maternal- and youth-reported supportive and unsupportive emotion socialization behaviors and T2 youth emotional and physiological regulation were examined with Pearson correlations; parent- and youth-rated emotional regulation at T1 was included as a covariate within construct. Continuous demographic variables were also included as covariates in the correlation analyses if they were related to a measure of T2 youth regulation or symptoms. Finally, we conducted independent samples t-tests comparing emotion socialization behaviors at T1 of parents whose youth displayed RSA augmentation during the puzzle task with those whose youth displayed RSA withdrawal.

Results

Descriptive Statistics

Youth’s regulation outcomes (RSA-R, parent- and youth-rated coping and dysregulation) were within normal limits of skewness and kurtosis (<2; West et al., 1995). One youth’s rating of their parent’s unsupportive emotion socialization was identified as an outlier (Z-score = 3.22) and winsorized to equal the next highest participant’s score (Z-score = 2.17).

Examination of relations among demographic characteristics and youth’s emotion regulation and affective symptoms at T2 revealed few significant associations. Non-Hispanic parents rated their youth higher in coping than Hispanic parents (t (30) = −1.83, p = .039). Boys rated themselves higher in coping than girls (t (29) = 3.07, p = .002), and girls rated themselves higher than boys on anger (t (29) = −1.74, p = .047) and depression (t (29) = −2.06, p = .025). Family income correlated with youth PTSS (r = −0.49, p = .007) and youth-rated depression (r = .46, p = .009).

Emotion Socialization Predicting Youth’s Regulation Over-time

Pearson correlations were used to examine our hypotheses related to T1 parental ES predicting youth’s T2 physiological regulation and parent- and youth-reported emotion regulation (Table 3). We first examined parents’ unsupportive responses to youth’s negative emotions. Parents’ and youth’s reports of parental unsupportive ES were not significantly correlated. Youth’s reports of their parents’ unsupportive responses at T1 positively and significantly predicted their RSA reactivity during the frustration task, such that more unsupportive responses were associated with less RSA withdrawal/more RSA augmentation during the task. Youth’s reports of parents’ unsupportive responses also positively and significantly predicted both parents’ and youth’s reports of youth’s dysregulation at T2, controlling for T1 dysregulation. Parents’ reports of their own unsupportive responses at T1were not associated with any of the measures of emotion regulation at T2.

Table 3.

Partial Correlations Between Emotion Socialization at Time 1 and Youth’s Emotion Regulation at Time 2, Controlling for Youth Emotion Regulation at Time 1.

	Unsupportive ES		Supportive ES
	Parent Report	Youth Report	Parent Report	Youth Report
Unsupportive ES
Parent report	__
Youth report	.17	__
Supportive ES
Parent report	−.06	.34	__
Youth report	.06	.19	.37*	__
RSA-R	.26	.42*	.02	−.17
Parent report
Coping	.08	−.13	.05	.27
Dysregulation	.15	.32⁺	.04	.03
Youth report
Coping	.26	−.01	.26	.41*
Dysregulation	−.07	.36*	.36*	−.26
n	31	32	31	32
M	9.65	9.07	26.59	26.46
SD	2.63	2.58	3.6	5.1
Range	5.0–17.0	5.3–14.7	21.0–34.0	14.0–34.7

Note. Associations with T2 parent- and youth-rated coping and dysregulation controlled for the same construct at T1; because RSA was only measured at T2, we were not able to control for T1 RSA. ES = Emotion Socialization. RSA-R was calculated such that positive values reflect RSA increases during the task (augmentation) and negative values reflect RSA decreases (withdrawal).

^*p < .05.

⁺p < .10.

We next examined parents’ supportive responses to youth’s negative emotions. Parents’ and youth’s reports of parental supportive ES were significantly correlated. Youth’s reports of their parents’ supportive responses at T1 positively and significantly predicted youth’s self-reports of their coping at T2, controlling for T1 coping. Surprisingly, parents’ reports of their own supportive responses significantly predicted higher ratings of youth’s self-reports of their dysregulation at T2, controlling for T1 dysregulation. Parents’ supportive responses were not associated with RSA reactivity.

Group comparisons of RSA augmenters versus withdrawers revealed that youth with RSA augmentation during the task at T2 had parents with significantly higher T1 self-ratings of unsupportive ES (Table 4); a similar pattern emerged for T1 youth ratings of unsupportive ES but did not reach significance (p = .07). There were no significant differences in parents’ T1 supportive ES between youth with RSA augmentation and withdrawal at T2.

Table 4.

Comparison of Time 1 Parent Emotion Socialization Behaviors of Youth With RSA Augmentation and Withdrawal During challenge puzzle task at Time 2.

Characteristic, Time 1	RSA Augmenters			RSA Withdrawers			t	Df	p	Cohen’s d
Characteristic, Time 1	n	M	SD	n	M	SD	t	Df	(One-sided)	Cohen’s d
Parent-rated unsupportive ES	10	11.13	2.78	14	8.56	2.60	2.32	22	.015	.96
Youth-rated unsupportive ES	10	10.07	2.84	15	8.60	2.02	1.51	23	.072	.62
Parent-rated supportive ES	10	25.91	2.92	14	26.55	3.63	−0.46	22	.326	−.19
Youth-rated supportive ES	10	26.30	5.85	15	27.04	4.03	−0.38	23	.355	−.15

Note. ES = Emotion Socialization.

Associations Between Youth’s Symptoms and Their Regulation

Partial correlations were used to examine associations among multiple measures of youth’s emotion-regulation (parent-report, youth-report, and autonomic regulation) and youth symptoms (parent- and youth-report), controlling for youth age and family income (Table 5). Notably, there were no significant cross-informant associations between parent and youth reports of youth’s coping or dysregulated behaviors (see bolded correlations). Parents’ ratings of youth’s coping were correlated significantly with parents’ ratings of youth’s anger, anxiety, depression, and PTSS, but not with any of youth’s self-ratings of affective symptoms. Youth’s report of their own coping was correlated significantly with their self-ratings of anger, and depression, and with their parents’ ratings of their depression. Parents’ ratings of youth’s dysregulated behavior were associated significantly with parents’ ratings of youth’s anger, anxiety, and depression. Youth’s ratings of their own dysregulation trended with their self-ratings of anger.

Table 5.

Partial Correlations Between Youth Emotion Regulation and Affective Symptoms, Time 2, Controlling for Child Age and Family Income.

	RSA-R	Coping and Dysregulation				Symptoms
		Parent Report		Youth Report		Parent Report				Youth Report
		Coping	Dysreg	Coping	Dysreg	PTSS	Anger	Anxiety	Depr	Anger	Anxiety	Depr
RSA-R	__
Parent report
Coping	−.10	__
Dysregulation	.13	−.50**	__
Youth report
Coping	.10	.27	.12	__
Dysregulation	.25	.10	−.13	−.22	__
Parent report
PTSS	.05	−.37*	.30	−.35⁺	−.20	__
Anger	.47*	−.45*	.44*	−.17	.21	.32	__
Anxiety	.44*	−.45*	.39*	−.13	.02	.20	.62***	__
Depression	.49*	−.37*	.40*	−.45*	.17	.38*	.55**	.69***	__
Youth report
Anger	.13	−.28	.14	−.53**	.35⁺	−.05	.44*	.28	.41*	__
Anxiety	−.07	−.15	−.11	−.13	.15	−.16	.15	.11	−.04	.52**	__
Depression	.03	−.04	−.06	−.49**	.01	.16	.05	−.09	.26	.45*	.12	__
n	25	32	32	32	32	31	32	32	32	32	32	32
M	−.23	2.07	1.70	2.16	1.53	13.36	13.66	17.82	13.72	12.03	16.78	16.38
SD	.61	.40	.44	.41	.42	10.65	4.76	6.08	5.23	4.11	7.33	6.24
Range	−1.6–.9	1.2–2.8	1.3–2.6	1.5–2.9	1.0–2.4	2–50.7	6–23	8–31	6–26	5–21	8–32	8–28

Note. child age and family income controlled; parent and child report of the same construct shown in bold. RSA-R was calculated such that positive values reflect RSA increases during the task (augmentation) and negative values reflect RSA decreases (withdrawal).

*p < .05, **p < .01, ***<.001.

⁺p < .10.

Consistent with hypotheses, youth’s RSA reactivity during the frustration task correlated significantly with parents’ reports of youth’s anger, anxiety, and depression symptoms, with less withdrawal/more augmentation associated with higher symptoms. However, RSA reactivity was not significantly associated with youth’s self-reported symptoms.

Discussion

The current study utilized a multi-method, multi-informant approach to examine the influence of parental emotion socialization on behavioral and physiological indicators of regulation among a sample of trauma-exposed parents and their emerging adolescent offspring. Although these youth are at high risk for problems of emotion dysregulation secondary to their parent’s and/or their own traumatic experiences, emotion socialization is understudied in this population yet may provide a fruitful point of intervention for preventing impairment. Indeed, the pattern of our results suggests that the manner in which parents respond to their youth’s feelings of anger, sadness, and worry may influence youth’s subsequent physiological regulatory resources, as well as their development of adaptive regulation behaviors.

Consistent with our hypothesis, parents’ unsupportive responses at T1 predicted youth’s less adaptive regulation at T2 across measurement approaches. Youth-rated unsupportive parent responses predicted parent- and self-rated dysregulated behavior and higher levels of RSA-R (less withdrawal and/or augmentation). Although parent-rated unsupportive responses did not predict behavioral or physiological regulation, they differentiated youth who displayed RSA augmentation from youth who displayed RSA withdrawal during the puzzle task. These findings are broadly consistent with work showing that blunted RSA reactivity is associated with harsh parenting (Liu et al., 2020).

Youth’s behavioral and physiological regulation, in turn, was robustly associated concurrently with their affective symptoms. RSA-R during the puzzle challenge task positively correlated with parents’ reports of youth’s anger, depression, and anxiety symptoms. Strong patterns of association also emerged between youth’s coping and dysregulation behaviors and their anger, depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress symptoms, using both parent and youth report. Although the current data does not support tests of indirect pathways, together these findings suggest that unsupportive ES responses may interfere with both the marshaling of physiological resources and the development of behavioral strategies needed to actively cope with stressful situations, which is associated with a greater likelihood to exhibit both internalizing and externalizing symptoms. These findings warrant further investigation in a larger longitudinal sample spanning additional time points that would support rigorous testing of these potential causal pathways.

We found mixed support for our hypothesis that parents’ supportive responses to youth’s negative emotions at T1 would predict youth’s more adaptive regulation at T2. Consistent with previous studies, there were no direct effects of supportive responses on youth’s later RSA-R, suggesting that supportive responses may be more neutral than unsupportive responses in their effect on physiological regulation. Youth reports of parents’ T1 supportive responses did, however, predict youth’s later self-rated coping behaviors. Although unexpected, parents’ reports of their own supportive responses predicted higher ratings of youth’s self-reports of their dysregulation at T2. While this conflicts with studies of younger children (Meyer et al., 2014), it is consistent with emerging evidence documenting an age-related reduction in the beneficial impact of supportive emotion socialization (Castro & Nelson, 2018; Miller-Slough et al., 2018; Rogers et al., 2016), particularly for more dysregulated children and adolescents (Dixon-Gordon et al., 2020), and underscores the importance of a developmental perspective in examining these patterns. While it is beyond the scope of the current investigation to examine moderators, research by Dixon-Gordon and colleagues (2020) would suggest that it is possible that the youth who demonstrated increases in coping behavior were less dysregulated at T1 and thus more able to benefit from supportive responses and/or their more regulated behavior elicited greater supportive responses from their parents. In contrast, for youth who were more dysregulated at T1, parents’ supportive responses, which tend to validate and accept negative affect, may have served to reinforce youth’s emotionally labile behaviors (Rogers et al., 2016). Understanding what types of parental responses, and under which circumstances, are most likely to enhance youth’s adaptive responses is a critical next step in this field of research.

Mixed findings also emerged in our examination of concordance among parents’ and youth’s reports of parents’ ES. Although there was moderate agreement in their ratings of parents’ supportive behaviors, parents’ and youth’s ratings of unsupportive behaviors were not significantly correlated. Informant discrepancies are not uncommon in psychological research (De Los Reyes, 2013), and a similar lack of concordance between parent and youth reports of ES has been found elsewhere (Korelitz & Garber, 2016; McQuade et al., 2023). While one might conjecture that the discrepancy in unsupportive ratings is due to parents’ tendency to report their behaviors more positively than their offspring (Korelitz & Garber, 2016), parents in the current study reported more unsupportive responses than their offspring did, suggesting that this discrepancy is not due to parents’ reporting bias. In the current study only youth’s reports of unsupportive responses predicted physiological and behavioral (by both parent and youth report) dysregulation at T2. Similarly, McQuade and colleagues (2023) found that among parent-rated, adolescent-rated, and observed ES, only adolescent-rated reports of their parents’ ES behaviors were associated with concurrent adolescent emotion regulation. These findings suggest that youth’s experience of their parents’ ES may be a critical factor in the outcome of their physiological and behavioral emotion regulation. That is, how youth – not parents or outside observers – perceive their parents’ responses to their negative emotions may be the factor that most significantly contributes to their regulatory or dysregulatory impact. This is a noteworthy consideration for future research, as studies of parental ES frequently rely solely on parental report.

The current findings must be considered within the context of certain limitations. The small sample limited the power to detect effects. Nevertheless, several significant patterns of moderate effect size emerged in the longitudinal associations, suggesting the presence of relatively robust associations between parental ES and youths’ self-regulation in early adolescence. Thus, these findings warrant further examination in a larger sample that would allow for examination of interactive patterns between youth regulation and parental ES and contextual moderators (e.g., parent ethnicity or youth gender). Although study recruitment was open to all parents, only one father participated. Because removing him did not alter the pattern of results, he was included to retain power. However, paternal ES may have unique associations with the development of youth emotion regulation (Breaux et al., 2016), and warrants the active recruitment and inclusion of fathers in future studies.

The current study examined the effect of parental emotion socialization on the development of emerging adolescents’ emotion regulation within a sample of trauma-affected families. It is one of few studies to explore these important processes longitudinally, within this age range, and/or among a high-risk group of youth. Despite the small sample size, our multi-method findings suggest that parental ES plays a critical role in the development of emerging adolescents’ physiological and behavioral regulation capacities, underscoring the need for future investigation of these important intrafamilial patterns. A better understanding of these processes may help to mitigate the intergenerational transmission of mental health risks within trauma-affected families, by providing valuable insight to interventions designed to support the development of adaptive emotional processes, during a critical time for bolstering children’s emotion regulation capacities prior to adolescence.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Alden Landry, Seyenah Lopez, Kayceety Mullaj, Yamini Pant, and Molly VanLuling for their assistance collecting the data for this study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development under Grant K23HD094824.

Ethical Statement

Carolyn A. Greene

Sarah A. O. Gray

Elizabeth A. Skowron

Data Availability Statement

Data are available upon request.*

Author Biographies

Carolyn Greene is a clinical psychologist and an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Her research focuses on understanding the impact of interpersonal trauma and its mental health sequelae on parents and their offspring, with a particular interest in understanding intrafamilial emotional processes that affect the development of child and adolescent emotion regulation.

Sarah Gray is a clinical psychologist and an associate professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Her research examines the developmental consequences of trauma and early life adversity, with a specific focus on intergenerational processes. She takes a multilevel approach, integrating narrative, behavioral, and physiological measurement to understand how risk and resilience is transmitted across generations through behavioral and biological pathways, situated in relational and broader social contexts.

Elizabeth A. Skowron is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon. She studies the effectiveness of child and family interventions, including Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) and a newly developed trauma-informed adaptation to PCIT, for supporting caregivers and strengthening biological and behavioral markers of emotion regulation and self-control in caregivers and children.

Margaret Briggs-Gowan is a developmental psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Her research broadly centers on mental health problems in young children, including identifying risk factors, and pinpointing underlying genetic, stress-response, and neurocognitive factors involved in these processes. She has expertise in psychometric assessment and early identification of young children who are beginning to manifest problems.

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