Parenting measurement, normativeness, and associations with child outcomes: Comparing evidence from four non-Western cultures.

This study compared parenting across four non-Western cultures to test cross-cultural commonality and specificity principles in three aspects: measurement properties, parenting normativeness, and their associations with child outcomes. Both mothers and fathers (N = 1509 dyads) with preschool-aged children (M = 5.00 years; 48% girls) from urban areas of four countries (Malaysia, N = 372; China, N = 441; Turkey, N = 402; and Japan, N = 294) reported on four parenting constructs (authoritative, authoritarian, group harmony socialization, and intrusive control) and their sub-dimensions using modified culturally relevant measures. Teachers reported on children's internalizing, externalizing, and prosocial behaviors. The commonality principle was supported by two sets of findings: (1) full measurement invariance was established for most parenting constructs and sub-dimensions, except that intrusive control only reached partial scalar invariance, and (2) no variations were found in associations between parenting and any child outcomes across cultures or parent gender at the construct level for all four parenting constructs and at the sub-dimensional level for authoritarian and intrusive control sub-dimensions. The specificity principle was supported by the other two sets of findings: (1) cross-cultural differences in parenting normativeness did not follow the pattern of economic development but yielded culture-specific patterns, and (2) at the sub-dimensional level, the authoritative parenting and group harmony socialization sub-dimensions were differently associated with child outcomes across cultures and/or parent gender. The findings suggested that examining specific dimensions rather than broad parenting constructs is necessary to reflect cultural specificities and nuances. Our study provided a culturally-invariant instrument and a three-step guide for future parenting research to examine cross-cultural commonalities/specificities. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: This is the first study to use an instrument with measurement invariance across multiple non-Western cultures to examine the commonality and specificity principles in parenting. Measurement invariance was achieved across cultures for authoritative and authoritarian parenting, group harmony socialization, intrusive control, and their sub-dimensions, supporting the commonality principle. Cross-cultural differences in parenting normativeness did not follow the pattern of economic development but yielded culture-specific patterns, supporting the specificity principle. Both commonalities and specificities were manifested in associations between parenting and child outcomes across cultures.

Associations between brain and behavioral processing of facial expressions of emotion and sensory reactivity in young children.

The ability to decode and accurately identify information from facial emotions may advantage young children socially. This capacity to decode emotional information may likewise be influenced by individual differences in children's temperament. This study investigated whether sensory reactivity and perceptual awareness, two dimensions of temperament, as well as children's ability to accurately label emotions relates to the neural processing of emotional content in faces. Event related potentials (ERPs) of 4 to 6 year-old children (N  = 119) were elicited from static displays of anger, happy, fearful, sad, and neutral emotion faces. Children, as a group, exhibited differential early (N290) and mid-latency (P400) event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to facial expressions of emotion. Individual differences in children's sensory reactivity were associated with enhanced P400 amplitudes to neutral, sad, and fearful faces. In a separate task, children were asked to provide an emotional label for the same images. Interestingly, children less accurately labeled the same neutral, sad, and fearful faces, suggesting that, contrary to previous work showing enhanced attentional processing to threatening cues (i.e., fear), children higher in sensory reactivity may deploy more attentional resources when decoding ambiguous emotional cues.

Development of mother-infant co-regulation: The role of infant vagal tone and temperament at 6, 9, and 12 months of age.

Using Porges' (2011) Polyvagal Theory as a backdrop, this study examined whether changes in parasympathetic functioning, as indexed by baseline measures of cardiac vagal tone at 6, 9, and 12 months of age, were linked to changes in infants' (N = 101) dyadic co-regulation over these same time points. Mothers and infants were observed at each time point during a 15-minute unstructured free-play and co-regulated patterns of interactions were coded using the Revised Relational Coding System (Fogel et al., 2003). Analyses were carried out using multi-process growth curve modeling to examine baseline measurements (intercepts) and changes (slopes) in vagal tone, co-regulation as well as mothers' report of infant temperament. Findings demonstrate links between infants' vagal tone and changes in mother-infant co-regulation. Specifically, increasing levels of cardiac vagal tone was related to increases in symmetrical but decreases in unilateral patterns of co-regulation over time. These findings suggest that changes in the autonomic nervous system likely undergird infants' improving capacity to engage in more mutually sustained patterns of co-regulation.