Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-03T13:26:45.687Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 8 - Parental Assistance with Children’s Extrinsic Emotion Regulation across Development

from Part III - Influence of Parenting on Child Emotion Regulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2024

By
Emily M. Cohodes  and
Dylan G. Gee
Edited by
Isabelle Roskam ,
James J. Gross  and
Moïra Mikolajczak
Isabelle Roskam
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
James J. Gross
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Moïra Mikolajczak
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Get access

Summary

Across development, parents play a critical role in assisting children in regulating emotions via extrinsic emotion regulation (ER). Cross-species evidence suggests that parental influences on corticolimbic circuitry – thought to underlie ER – peak in childhood and wane during the transition to adolescence as children increasingly rely on intrinsic regulation strategies. Gottman’s parental meta-emotion philosophy laid important groundwork for recent advances in assessment of parental assistance with children’s use of specific ER strategies, a line of work that has the potential to further understanding of how parents socialize children’s reliance on certain ER strategies. Initial evidence suggests that the strategies parents assist with may vary as a function of child age and parent-level factors such as psychopathology and reliance on specific intrinsic ER strategies. We discuss future directions in the study of parental assistance with children’s ER focused on further understanding normative developmental trajectories of parents’ assistance with specific ER strategies and neurobiological correlates of specific profiles of parental assistance.

Keywords

parental assistance with emotion regulationcorticolimbic circuitryemotion socializationmeta-emotion philosophy
Type
Chapter
Information
Emotion Regulation and Parenting , pp. 149 - 165
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aldao, A., & Christensen, K. (2015). Linking the expanded process model of emotion regulation to psychopathology by focusing on behavioral outcomes of regulation. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 27–36.Google Scholar
Aldao, A., & Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2010). Specificity of cognitive emotion regulation strategies: A transdiagnostic examination. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 48(10), 974–983. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2010.06.002Google Scholar
Aldao, A., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Schweizer, S. (2010). Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(2), 217–237.Google Scholar
Brajša-Žganec, A. (2014). Emotional life of the family: Parental meta-emotions, children’s temperament and internalising and externalising problems. Društvena Istraživanja-Časopis Za Opća Društvena Pitanja, 23(01), 25–45.Google Scholar
Callaghan, B., Gee, D. G., Gabard-Durnam, L., Telzer, E. H., Humphreys, K. L., Goff, B., Shapiro, M., Flannery, J., Lumian, D. S., Fareri, D. S., Caldera, C., & Tottenham, N. (2019). Decreased amygdala reactivity to parent cues protects against anxiety following early adversity: An examination across 3-years. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 4(7), 664–671. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2019.02.001Google Scholar
Callaghan, B. L., & Tottenham, N. (2016). The neuro-environmental loop of plasticity: A cross-species analysis of parental effects on emotion circuitry development following typical and adverse caregiving. Neuropsychopharmacology, 41(1), 163–176.Google Scholar
Chen, F. M., Lin, H. S., & Li, C. H. (2012). The role of emotion in parent-child relationships: Children’s emotionality, maternal meta-emotion, and children’s attachment security. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 21(3), 403–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohodes, E., Chen, S., & Lieberman, A. (2017). Maternal meta-emotion philosophy moderates effect of maternal symptomatology on preschoolers exposed to domestic violence. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 26(7), 1831–1843.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohodes, E., Hagan, M., Lieberman, A. F., & Dimmler, M. H. (2016). Maternal meta-emotion philosophy and cognitive functioning in children exposed to violence. Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma, 9(3), 191–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohodes, E. M., McCauley, S., & Gee, D. G. (2021). Parental buffering of stress in the time of COVID-19: Family-level factors may moderate the association between pandemic-related stress and youth symptomatology. Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, 49, 935–948. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-020-00732-6Google Scholar
Cohodes, E. M., Preece, D. A., McCauley, S., Rogers, M. K., Gross, J. J., & Gee, D. G. (2022). Development and validation of the Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) questionnaire. Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, 50(2), 133–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-020-00759-9Google Scholar
Colombo, D., Fernández-Álvarez, J., Suso-Ribera, C., Cipresso, P., Valev, H., Leufkens, T., Sas, C., Garcia-Palacios, A., Riva, G., & Botella, C. (2020). The need for change: Understanding emotion regulation antecedents and consequences using ecological momentary assessment. Emotion, 20(1), 30–36. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000671CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Denham, S. A., Mitchell-Copeland, J., Strandberg, K., Auerbach, S., & Blair, K. (1997). Parental contributions to peschoolers’ emotional competence: Direct and indirect effects. Motivation and Emotion, 21(1), 65–86. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024426431247Google Scholar
Diaz, A., & Eisenberg, N. (2015). The process of emotion regulation is different from individual differences in emotion regulation: Conceptual arguments and a focus on individual differences. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 37–47.Google Scholar
Dozier, M., Roben, C. K. P., Caron, E., Hoye, J., & Bernard, K. (2018). Attachment and biobehavioral catch-up: An evidence-based intervention for vulnerable infants and their families. Psychotherapy Research, 28(1), 18–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2016.1229873Google Scholar
Ellis, B. H., Alisic, E., Reiss, A., Dishion, T., & Fisher, P. A. (2014). Emotion regulation among preschoolers on a continuum of risk: The role of maternal emotion coaching. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 23(6), 965–974.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ellis, B. J., Figueredo, A. J., Brumbach, B. H., & Schlomer, G. L. (2009). Fundamental dimensions of environmental risk. Human Nature, 20(2), 204–268.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fabes, R. A., Eisenberg, N., & Bernzweig, J. (1990). The coping with children’s negative emotions scale: Procedures and scoring. Arizona State University. https://ccnes.org/Google Scholar
Garnefski, N., Kraaij, V., & Spinhoven, P. (2002). Manual for the use of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. DATEC.Google Scholar
Gee, D. G. (2016). Sensitive periods of emotion regulation: Influences of parental care on frontoamygdala circuitry and plasticity: Sensitive periods of emotion regulation. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2016 (153), 87–110. https://doi.org/10.1002/cad.20166CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gee, D. G. (2020). Caregiving influences on emotional learning and regulation: Applying a sensitive period model. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 36, 177–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.11.003Google Scholar
Gee, D. G., & Caballero, C. (2019). Predicting mental health in adolescence: Frontoinsular circuitry, emotion in daily life, and risk for depression. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 4, 684–685. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2019.06.004Google Scholar
Gee, D. G., & Casey, B. J. (2015). The impact of developmental timing for stress and recovery. Neurobiology of Stress, 1, 184–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ynstr.2015.02.001Google Scholar
Gee, D. G., & Cohodes, E. M. (2021). Caregiving influences on development: A sensitive period for biological embedding of predictability and safety cues. Current Directions in Psychological Science 30(5), 376–383. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214211015673CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gee, D. G., Gabard-Durnam, L., Telzer, E. H., Humphreys, K. L., Goff, B., Shapiro, M., Flannery, J., Lumian, D. S., Fareri, D. S., Caldera, C., & Tottenham, N. (2014). Maternal buffering of human amygdala-prefrontal circuitry during childhood but not during adolescence. Psychological Science, 25(11), 2067–2078. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614550878Google Scholar
Gerhardt, M., Feng, X., Wu, Q., Hooper, E. G., Ku, S., & Chan, M. H. (2020). A naturalistic study of parental emotion socialization: Unique contributions of fathers. Journal of Family Psychology, 34(2), 204–214.Google Scholar
Gianino, A., & Tronick, E. Z. (1988). The mutual regulation model: The infant’s self and interactive regulation and coping and defensive capacities. In Field, T. M., McCabe, P. M., & Schneiderman, N. (Eds.), Stress and coping across development (pp. 47–68). Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Glynn, L. M., & Baram, T. Z. (2019). The influence of unpredictable, fragmented parental signals on the developing brain. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 53, Article 100736. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yfrne.2019.01.002CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1996). Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families: Theoretical models and preliminary data. Journal of Family Psychology, 10(3), 243–268.Google Scholar
Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1997). Meta-emotion: How families communicate. Routledge.Google Scholar
Gratz, K. L., & Roemer, L. (2004). Multidimensional assessment of emotion regulation and dysregulation: Development, factor structure, and initial validation of the difficulties in emotion regulation scale. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 26(1), 41–54.Google Scholar
Grolnick, W. S., McMenamy, J. M., & Kurowski, C. O. (2006). Emotional self-regulation in infancy and toddlerhood. In Balter, L. & Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. (Eds.), Child psychology: A handbook of contemporary issues (pp. 3–25). Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Gross, J. J. (1998). Antecedent-and response-focused emotion regulation: Divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(1), 224–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gross, J. J. (2015). The extended process model of emotion regulation: Elaborations, applications, and future directions. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 130–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2015.989751Google Scholar
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gullone, E., & Taffe, J. (2012). The emotion regulation questionnaire for children and adolescents (ERQ–CA): A psychometric evaluation. Psychological Assessment, 24(2), 409–417.Google Scholar
Gunnar, M. R., & Donzella, B. (2002). Social regulation of the cortisol levels in early human development. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 27(1–2), 199–220.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hakim-Larson, J., Parker, A., Lee, C., Goodwin, J., & Voelker, S. (2006). Measuring parental meta-emotion: Psychometric properties of the emotion-related parenting styles self-test. Early Education and Development, 17(2), 229–251. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15566935eed1702_2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halberstadt, A. G., Dunsmore, J. C., Bryant, A. Jr., Parker, A. E., Beale, K. S., & Thompson, J. A. (2013). Development and validation of the Parents’ Beliefs about Children’s Emotions Questionnaire. Psychological Assessment, 25(4), 1195–1210. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033695Google Scholar
Halligan, S. L., Cooper, P. J., Fearon, P., Wheeler, S. L., Crosby, M., & Murray, L. (2013). The longitudinal development of emotion regulation capacities in children at risk for externalizing disorders. Development and Psychopathology, 25(2), 391–406. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579412001137Google Scholar
Hofer, M. A. (1994). Early relationships as regulators of infant physiology and behavior. Acta Paediatrica, 83, 9–18.Google Scholar
Hooven, C., Gottman, J. M., & Katz, L. F. (1995). Parental meta-emotion structure predicts family and child outcomes. Cognition & Emotion, 9(2–3), 229–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hostinar, C. E., Johnson, A. E., & Gunnar, M. R. (2015). Parent support is less effective in buffering cortisol stress reactivity for adolescents compared to children. Developmental Science, 18(2), 281–297.Google Scholar
Hostinar, C. E., Sullivan, R. M., & Gunnar, M. R. (2014). Psychobiological mechanisms underlying the social buffering of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical axis: A review of animal models and human studies across development. Psychological Bulletin, 140(1), 256–282. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032671Google Scholar
Izadpanah, S., Schumacher, M., Bähr, A., Stopsack, M., Grabe, H. J., & Barnow, S. (2016). A 5-year longitudinal study of the adolescent reinforcement sensitivity as a risk factor for anxiety symptoms in adulthood: Investigating the indirect effect of cognitive emotion regulation. Personality and Individual Differences, 95, 68–73.Google Scholar
Johnson, V., & Lieberman, A. (2007). Variation in behavior problems of preschoolers exposed to domestic violence: The role of mother’s attunement to children’s emotional experiences. Journal of Family Violence, 22(5), 297–308.Google Scholar
Katz, L. F., & Hunter, E. C. (2007). Maternal meta-emotion philosophy and adolescent depressive symptomatology. Social Development, 16(2), 343–360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, L. F., & Windecker-Nelson, B. (2004). Parental meta-emotion philosophy in families with conduct-problem children: Links with peer relations. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 32(4), 385–398.Google Scholar
Katz, L. F., & Windecker-Nelson, B. (2006). Domestic violence, emotion coaching, and child adjustment. Journal of Family Psychology, 20(1), 56–67.Google Scholar
Kiel, E. J., & Kalomiris, A. E. (2015). Current themes in understanding children’s emotion regulation as developing from within the parent–child relationship. Current Opinion in Psychology, 3, 11–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.01.006Google Scholar
Kim, J., & Cicchetti, D. (2010). Longitudinal pathways linking child maltreatment, emotion regulation, peer relations, and psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(6), 706–716. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2009.02202.xGoogle Scholar
Mancini, V. O., Heritage, B. J., Preece, D., Cohodes, E. M., Gross, J. J., Gee, D. G., & Finlay-Jones, A. (2022). How caregivers support children’s emotion regulation: Construct validation of the Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) Questionnaire. Assessment, 30(4), 1040–1051. https://doi.org/10.1177/10731911221082708.Google Scholar
Mason, G. M., Goldstein, M. H., & Schwade, J. A. (2019). The role of multisensory development in early language learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 183, 48–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.12.011Google Scholar
Moriceau, S., & Sullivan, R. M. (2006). Maternal presence serves as a switch between learning fear and attraction in infancy. Nature Neuroscience, 9(8), 1004–1006.Google Scholar
Murray, D. W., Rosanbalm, K., Christopoulos, C., & Meyer, A. L. (2019). An applied contextual model for promoting self-regulation enactment across development: Implications for prevention, public health and future research. Journal of Primary Prevention, 40(4), 367–403. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10935-019-00556-1Google Scholar
Pratt, M., Singer, M., Kanat-Maymon, Y., & Feldman, R. (2015). Infant negative reactivity defines the effects of parent–child synchrony on physiological and behavioral regulation of social stress. Development and Psychopathology, 27(4 Pt 1), 1191–1204.Google Scholar
Ruiz, F. J. (2010). A review of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) empirical evidence: Correlational, experimental psychopathology, component and outcome studies. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 10(1), 125–162.Google Scholar
Saarni, C. (1999). The development of emotional competence. Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Tan, P. Z., Oppenheimer, C. W., Ladouceur, C. D., Butterfield, R. D., & Silk, J. S. (2020). A review of associations between parental emotion socialization behaviors and the neural substrates of emotional reactivity and regulation in youth. Developmental Psychology, 56(3), 516–527.Google Scholar
Thompson, R. A., & Goodman, M. (2010). Development of emotion regulation: More than meets the eye. In Kring, A. M. & Sloan, D. M. (Eds.), Emotion regulation and psychopathology: A transdiagnostic approach to etiology and treatment (pp. 38–58). Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Tottenham, N. (2012). Human amygdala development in the absence of species-expected caregiving. Developmental Psychobiology, 54(6), 598–611. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.20531Google Scholar
Tottenham, N. (2015). Social scaffolding of human amygdala-mPFCcircuit development. Social Neuroscience, 10(5), 489–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2015.1087424Google Scholar
Wang, M., & Saudino, K. J. (2013). Genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in emotion regulation and its relation to working memory in toddlerhood. Emotion, 13(6), 1055–1067.Google Scholar
Wu, Q., Feng, X., Yan, J., Hooper, E. G., Gerhardt, M., & Ku, S. (2020). Maternal emotion coaching styles in the context of maternal depressive symptoms: Associations with preschoolers’ emotion regulation. Emotion, 22(5), 1171–1184. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000916Google Scholar
Zaki, J., & Williams, W. C. (2013). Interpersonal emotion regulation. Emotion, 13(5), 803–810. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033839Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×