Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2019 Emotion socialization and psychological distress: The mediating roles of emotion recognition and emotion regulation Madelyne Losby Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.edu/etd Part of the Counseling Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Losby, Madelyne, "Emotion socialization and psychological distress: The mediating roles of emotion recognition and emotion regulation" (2019). Graduate Theses and Dissertations.edu/etd/17045 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact digirep@iastate.
Emotion socialization and psychological distress: The mediating roles of emotion recognition and emotion regulation by Madelyne M. Losby A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE Major: Psychology Program of Study Committee: Monica Marsee, Co-major Professor David Vogel, Co-major Professor Douglas Gentile The student author, whose presentation of the scholarship herein was approved by the program of study committee, is solely responsible for the content of this thesis. The Graduate College will ensure this thesis is globally accessible and will not permit alterations after a degree is conferred. Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2019 Copyright © Madelyne M.
All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES. iv LIST OF TABLES. 1 Emotion Socialization, Emotional Intelligence, and Distress.
7 Non-Supportive Strategies. 8 Socialization and Distress. 15 Emotion Recognition and Distress. 18 Emotion Regulation and Distress.
21 Emotion Socialization and Emotional Intelligence. 35 Data Preparation and Cleaning. 42 Limitations and Future Directions. 52 iv LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1.1 Conceptual Model of variables .1 Supportive Strategies Model.2 Non-Supportive Strategies Model.1 Supportive Strategies Model.2 Non-Supportive Strategies Model.
40 v LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1 Racial and Ethnic Group Identification. 28 Table 2 Sample Means, Standard Deviations, and Ranges of Study Measures. 26 Table 3 Zero-Order Correlations and Alpha Coefficients of Study Measures. 26 Table 4 Mediation Model of Supportive Strategies.
38 Table 5 Mediation Model of Non-Supportive Strategies. 40 vi ABSTRACT The strategies parents use when responding to their child’s emotions, particularly negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness, have been shown to be associated with distress later in life. In addition, both supportive and non-supportive strategies, have been correlated with emotional development, particularly emotion recognition and emotion regulation. These processes comprise, emotional intelligence, which has been linked to psychological distress.
Much of the research in this area has been done with children, predominantly preschoolers, and as such, research is needed with older populations, particularly emerging adults (ages 18 to 29), who are within a developmental period where psychological distress is more prevalent. As such, the current study asked emerging adults (N = 497) to retrospectively examine the way their parents responded to their negative emotions, and assessed current symptoms related to psychological distress, as well as emotional intelligence (i., emotion recognition and emotion regulation). Path analyses were conducted using PROCESS (Hayes, 2013) to explore two parallel mediation models in which emotion recognition and emotion regulation mediated the association between both supportive socialization strategies and non-supportive socialization strategies and psychological distress. The current results support a partial mediation between emotion socialization and distress through emotion recognition and emotion regulation.
Importance is derived from the novelty of the study, evidence for the conceptual model, and intervention implications for clinicians with clients. Limitations and future directions are discussed. INTRODUCTION There was an acclaimed movie from 2015, Inside Out, that gave an inside look of the mind of a girl named Riley. The movie uses the personification of emotions to convey what emotions are, how to recognize them within ourselves, and the impact of our ability to regulate emotions.
The way in which people recognize and regulate emotions is a key aspect researched and is commonly referred to as emotional intelligence (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002; MacCann & Roberts, 2008). Such abilities are learned in family and social contexts and can thus be negatively affected by problems with attachment, emotional expressiveness, and general parenting styles (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson, 2007; Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014). Research in developmental psychology is devoted to this topic, in particular, examining parental practices such as supportive and non-supportive emotion socialization strategies and their association with psychological distress in youth (Eisenberg et al., 1999; Johnson, Hawes, Eisenberg, Kohlhoff, & Dudensy, 2017; Klimes- Dougan, 2007; Teo, Raval, & Jansari, 2017; Rodas, Chavira, & Baker, 2017). Consistent with this, emotion socialization has been linked to the development of emotional intelligence (i., recognizing and regulating emotions; Brackett, Rivers, Shiffman, Lerner, & Salovey, 2006; Kafetsios, 2004; Zeidner, Roberts, & Matthews, 2002; Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014).
However, much of this work has been done with early childhood samples. In particular, one study examined a mediation model where emotional competence (or emotional intelligence) mediates the relationship between socialization strategies and adjustment outcomes with preschoolers (Mirabile, 2010). However, the role of these variables (see Figure 1.1) may be especially important for emerging adults (ages 18-29), who are at a time when many of them are moving away from their parents for the first time, and 2 now they are practicing their skills of emotional intelligence (Hamdi & Iacono, 2014; Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014). The goal of this research is to fill these gaps in the literature by examining the potential role of emotional intelligence in the association between the socialization process and psychological symptoms in emerging adults.
Emotion Socialization, Emotional Intelligence, and Distress Emotion socialization, or the strategies used by parents when responding to their child’s emotions (i., rewarding, punishing, overriding, neglecting and magnifying; Klimes- Dougan et al., 2007), has been found to be linked to their children’s adjustment (Eisenberg et al., 1999; Johnson, Hawes, Eisenberg, Kohlhoff, & Dudensy, 2017; Teo, Raval, & Jansari, 2017). Research has found that the unsupportive strategies (i., punishing, neglecting, and overriding) in response to negative emotions (anger, fear, and sadness) have the strongest relationship to adjustment (Eisenberg et al., 1999; Klimes-Dougan et al. One study retroactively examined young adults’ perceptions of their emotion socialization from their parents and found that parents’ use of punishing and neglecting strategies with negative emotions was positively correlated with self-reported psychological distress (Garside & Klimes-Dougan, 2002). The strategies of punishment, neglect, and magnification when used in response to anger are reported more in youth with internalizing and externalizing problems and the strategy of reward when used with fear, anger, and sadness are reported more in youth without these problems (Klimes-Dougan et al.
Researchers have found that parental emotion socialization is linked to a child’s developing ability of the specific skill called emotion regulation (Bariola, Gullone, & Hughes, 2011; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998), as well as their ability to recognize different emotions (McElwain, Halberstadt, & Volling, 2007). Both emotion regulation and emotion recognition are components of overall emotional intelligence (Mayer, Salovey, & 3 Caruso, 2002; MacCann & Roberts, 2008). Researchers have found that emotional intelligence is associated with social functioning and adjustment (e., Ciarrochi, Heaven & Supavadeeprasit, 2008; Elfenbein, Marsh, & Ambady, 2002; Gross & John, 2003). For example, existing research has found that EI modestly predicts lower states of depression, anxiety, and stress, with correlations in the.
Whereas the correlations between variables have been established (Mirabile, 2010), the influence of emotional socialization on psychological distress through emotional intelligence has not been thoroughly examined. For example, when parents punish their child’s experience of sadness, the children may not learn how to recognize and regulate their sadness in the future. This could impact psychological distress later in life, in the form of symptoms of depression, anxiety, etc. As such, there is a need to address the gap in the literature by examining the potential mediating role of the development of the skill of emotional intelligence on emotion socialization and psychological distress for emerging adults.1 depicts the conceptual model guiding the current study, and a more specific model (that discuss two distinct types of emotional intelligence mediators: emotion recognition, and emotion regulation) will be presented in the next section.1 Conceptual Model of variables 4 CHAPTER 2.
LITERATURE REVIEW The goal of this research project is to examine the potential mediating role of emotional intelligence in the association between emotion socialization and psychological distress in emerging adults. First is the construct of emotion socialization and its link to psychological distress. The next section describes in detail emotional intelligence and its potential mediating role of the link between emotion socialization and psychological distress. I will also discuss the important phase of life emerging adulthood (ages 18-29) where these emotional processes may be particularly salient.
Lastly, I will describe my hypotheses. Emotion Socialization Emotion socialization is defined as the process of “teaching children about the emotion itself, its causes, consequences, its expression and regulation” (Eisenberg, Cumberland & Spinrad, 1998, p. In other words, emotion socialization includes the behaviors parents use to orient and model emotions for their children. Studies examining the beginning of the socialization process have found that infants begin recognizing and understanding emotions by imitating their parents’ facial expressions as early as 2.
For example, Malatesta et al. followed 111 infants and their mothers from ages 2. The researchers measured emotion socialization as the degree to which the infant imitated the mother’s facial expressions (i., interest, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, ‘knit brow’, and pain; [consistent with Ekman, 1969]). There were differences across age, with infants displaying a decrease in negative emotions versus an increase in positive emotions over the course of the study.
The imitation patterns suggest the start of emotion socialization occurs with observational learning and conditioning of facial expressions of emotions in infants (Malatesta et al. 5 Researchers have been discussing the ways that parents may be influencing their child’s emotional development for more than 30 years. One key theory is Meta-emotional theory (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996) which describes the theoretical pathways through which parents and children interact in ways that influence the child’s emotional development and outcomes. These pathways include both cognitive and behavioral components and the theory suggests that parenting strategies and responses to child emotions are predicted by cognitive processes, conscious or not, embedded within parents’ meta-emotion philosophy.
Parental socialization processes, both intentional and unintentional, are likely to impact the child’s emotional development (Denham, Bassett, & Wyatt, 2007). For example, using a semi-structured interview with 56 families, Gottman, Katz, & Hooven (1996) asked the parents about their own emotional experiences, and their philosophy around emotional expression. Specifically, conscious feelings, attitudes and behaviors about their child’s anger and sadness were identified. Gottman and colleagues (1996) found that positive parent behaviors (e., being aware of and talking about emotions when the child is upset or coaching the child to soothe him or herself) were positively associated with both child outcomes and children’s ability to regulate emotions.
Outcomes included child academic achievement (e., math, reading recognition and comprehension and child-peer interactions), and fewer behavior problems like hyperactivity, anti-social behaviors, hostility, and aggression (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996). Children’s emotion regulation was measured by an uncommon measure that asked parents about the instances in which they had to down regulate the child to reduce the child's level of activity (Katz & Gottman, 1986). Gottman and colleagues measured parenting (e. warmth and scaffolding-praising), which includes structured, responsive, and affectionate behaviors.
For example, a parent with an 6 authoritative parenting style would provide their child with directions beforehand and wait until the child did something right to enthusiastically praise them. Around the same time as Gottman’s Meta-Emotional theory, other researchers have also discussed the importance of parenting factors on children’s emotional development (while Gottman uses the term scaffolding-praising, and Eisenberg uses the term coaching). Most notably, Nancy Eisenberg suggested that certain family factors (e.