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).