Conceptualizing Emotion Regulation and Coregulation as Family-Level Phenomena.

The ability to regulate one's emotions is foundational for healthy development and functioning in a multitude of domains, whereas difficulties in emotional regulation are recognized as a risk factor for a range of adverse outcomes in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Caregivers play a key role in cultivating the development of emotion regulation through coregulation, or the processes by which they provide external support or scaffolding as children navigate their emotional experiences. The vast majority of research to date has examined coregulation in the context of caregiver-child dyads. In this paper, we consider emotion regulation and coregulation as family-level processes that unfold within and across multiple family subsystems and explore how triadic and whole family interactions may contribute to the development of children's emotion regulation skills. Furthermore, we will examine the implications of a family-centered perspective on emotion regulation for prevention of and intervention for childhood emotional and behavioral disorders. Because emotion regulation skills undergo such dramatic maturation during children's first several years of life, much of our focus will be on coregulation within and across the family system during early childhood; however, as many prevention and intervention approaches are geared toward school-aged children and adolescents, we will also devote some attention to later developmental periods.

Emerging biomarkers for child & family intervention studies: A review of EEG studies of parenting.

Most interventions for childhood mental health problems require significant parental involvement, and treatment programs are increasingly incorporating components aimed at enhancing parents' own self-regulation in the context of potentially stressful parent-child interactions. This paper discusses the promise of EEG in examining the rapidly unfolding perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and regulatory processes that occur in parenting, in hopes of ultimately informing child and family interventions. First, we review two separate bodies of work that have used EEG with parents: one examining event-related potential (ERP) measures, and the other examining frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA). We discuss benefits of each within the study of parenting, and also suggest other EEG metrics (such as event-related time-frequency analyses) that can be leveraged to fill current gaps in our knowledge. Finally, we discuss the potential for these findings to inform clinical work with children and families, such as identifying biomarkers that could aid in assessment, treatment recommendations, and monitoring response to interventions.

Rating Scales for Behavioral Health Screening System Within Pediatric Primary Care.

Barriers to conducting standardized behavioral health screening within pediatric primary care settings include engaging youth and families, limited time available for this activity, and difficulties related to obtaining behavioral health consultation and treatment from specialists. Child and adolescent psychiatrists may assist pediatric primary care practices with engaging youth and families around screening by assisting with identifying rating scales that have good psychometric characteristics across multiple languages and are validated in diverse samples and available within the public domain. Additionally, they may partner with pediatric primary care professionals to assist with optimizing screening workflows and linkage to specialized services.

Parental Wartime Deployment and Socioemotional Adjustment in Early Childhood: The Critical Role of Military Parents' Perceived Threat During Deployment.

Infants, toddlers, and preschool-aged children have unique developmental needs that render them vulnerable to challenges associated with parental military service. We used a sample of military-connected families with 3-6-year-old children (N = 104) to examine associations among children's socioemotional development and fathers' trauma-related deployment experiences, including perceived threat during deployment and exposure to combat and the aftermath of battle. Of these potential stressors, only paternal perceived threat during deployment was significantly associated with measures of mother-reported child adjustment. Fathers' perceived threat during deployment was associated with child behavior problems even after accounting for demographic variables and current paternal symptoms of posttraumatic stress, depression, and anxiety, ß = .36, p = .007. The association between fathers' perceived threat during deployment and child behavior problems was mediated by several family processes related to emotion socialization, including father-reported sensitive parenting, indirect effect (IE) B = 0.106, 95% CI [0.009, 0.236]; parent-child dysfunctional interaction, IE B = 0.119, 95% CI [0.014, 0.252]; and mother-reported family emotional responsiveness, IE B = 0.119, 95% CI [0.011, 0.258]. Implications for future research on the intergenerational transmission of traumatic stress as well as prevention and intervention efforts for military-connected families with young children are discussed.

Parental emotion and emotion regulation: A critical target of study for research and intervention to promote child emotion socialization.

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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Maternal emotion, motivation, and regulation during real-world parenting challenges.

Parenting is emotionally evocative, and parental emotions have implications for parenting behavior. We used experience sampling methodology to capture mothers' experiences and emotions in the context of real-world, day-to-day parenting challenges. Mothers (N = 55) of 14- to 24-month-olds participated in 4 phone interviews per day for 6 days in which they reported on their momentary emotions, motivational states (i.e., desire to approach/engage and avoid/disengage), and behaviors (i.e., actual engagement and disengagement). Aims involved examination of (a) whether asking mothers to report on motivational states, in addition to reporting on their actual behaviors, would result in information that could inform the study of emotion regulation; (b) how mothers' self-reported motivational states and behaviors were associated with reports of emotions during parenting challenges; and (c) whether it would be possible to identify patterns of co-occurring motivational states and behaviors that may reflect emotion regulation processes. Results indicated that specific emotions were more consistently associated with reports of motivational states than behavior. Multilevel latent class analysis of motivational state and behavior variables identified 4 distinct classes, some of which indicated maintenance of motivational state, whereas others suggested modulation. The relation of self-reported specific emotions with motivational states and patterns of emotion regulation were also examined, and findings for irritation/anger and concern/worry underscore the importance of studying parental emotions in context. The findings are discussed within the context of the growing literature on parental emotion, including how this body of work has the potential to inform prevention and intervention strategies for high-risk families. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in cortisol responses to fear and frustration during middle childhood.

The purpose of this study was to examine individual differences in the activation and regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in prepubertal 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-min controlled baseline period, 73 7-year-olds (40 boys and 33 girls) 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-min controlled regulation phase. A total of 17 saliva samples were collected, including 12 poststress samples at 5-min intervals. There was a significant stress modality effect, with children exposed to the fear condition reaching peak cortisol levels at 25min poststress and those exposed to the frustration condition reaching peak levels at 45min poststress. There was no difference in peak cortisol levels between the stress modalities. Individual variability across conditions was significant, with participants reaching peak levels as early as 10min poststress and as late as 60min poststress. Our data suggest that analysis of individual curves prior to making group-level comparisons may improve the explanatory power of HPA axis behavior models.

Hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis functioning in reactive and proactive aggression in children.

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.