Rationale and Importance of the Topic

Emotion regulation is conceptualized as an awareness, understanding, and acceptance of one’s emotions, as well as the ability to modulate emotional responses, control behaviors, and act in alignment with goals when experiencing negative emotions (Gratz & Roemer, 2004). In contrast, emotion dysregulation is marked by difficulties with or the absence of any of these components.

Emotion dysregulation is thought to underlie many abnormal symptoms and behaviors (Gross & Munoz, 1995), including self-harm (Linehan, 1993), aggressive behavior (Bushman et al., 2001), and clinical disorders like anxiety disorder (Mennin et al., 2002) and borderline personality disorder (Linehan, 1993).

Mothers’ experiences of emotion dysregulation may have intergenerational implications for the developing child. For example, maternal emotion dysregulation during pregnancy has been associated with newborn neurobehavioral outcomes (Ostlund et al., 2019) and feeding interactions with infants (de Campora et al., 2014).

Maternal emotion dysregulation may also have implications for parenting behaviors during infancy and later child development. This is because emotion regulation skills are requisite for parenting tasks like effectively responding to a crying infant’s needs and engaging in nurturing ways during daily interactions (Rutherford et al., 2015).

Aims and Hypotheses

More research is needed to garner a better understanding of the intergenerational implications of maternal emotion dysregulation for children’s outcomes, as well as the mechanisms that might mediate this association.

The first aim of this thesis is to test whether women’s prenatal emotion dysregulation predicts socioemotional outcomes. We hypothesize that women who report higher prenatal emotion dysregulation will have toddlers with greater socioemotional difficulties (Hypothesis 1).

The second aim of my thesis is to examine whether maternal sensitivity during infancy helps explain (or mediates) the intergenerational association between maternal emotion dysregulation and toddlers’ socioemotional outcomes. We hypothesize that mothers with higher prenatal emotion dysregulation will be less sensitive during non-distress mother-infant interactions (Hypothesis 2a). We also hypothesize that mothers who are less sensitive to infants will have toddlers with greater socioemotional difficulties (Hypothesis 2b).

Methods

To test these hypotheses, I will use data collected from mother-child dyads who participated in the BABY Affect and Behavior (BABY) study. Nearly 400 women were enrolled in the BABY study when they were pregnant and then completed several questionnaires. For my thesis, I will use data from the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004), which is a self-report questionnaire given to women to assess their emotion dysregulation.

The women were observed interacting with their infants during a non-distressing 10-minute play task when their infants were approximately 7 months old. Each mother’s sensitivity to the infants’ signals was rated using a 5-point Likert scale. Sensitivity is generally conceptualized as the mother’s ability to “follow the child’s lead” through an awareness of the child’s needs, moods, interests, and capabilities.

When the children were 18 months, mothers reported on their toddlers’ socioemotional outcomes using the Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (ITSEA; Carter et al., 2003). The ITSEA is a parent-report questionnaire designed to assess child socioemotional difficulties and competencies in four areas. The first domain is externalizing behaviors, which captures children’s activity/impulsivity, aggression/defiance, and peer aggression. The second domain is internalizing behaviors, which is composed of toddlers’ depression/withdrawal, general anxiety, separation distress, and inhibition to novelty. The third domain is dysregulation, which assesses toddlers’ sleep problems, negative emotionality, eating difficulties, and sensory sensitivities. The fourth domain is competence, which includes toddlers’ compliance, attention, imitation/play, mastery, motivation, empathy, and prosocial peer relations. I will independently examine each of these domains in my thesis.

References Bushman, B. J., Baumeister, R. F., & Phillips, C. M. (2001). Do people agree to improve their mood? Catharsis beliefs, affect regulation opportunity, and aggressive responding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 17–32.

Carter, A. S., Briggs-Gowan, M. J., Jones, S. M., & Little, T. D. (2003). The Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (ITSEA): factor structure, reliability, and validity. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 31, 495–514. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1025449031360

De Campora, G., Giromini, L., Larciprete, G., Volsi, V. L., & Zavattini, G. C. (2014). The impact of maternal overweight and emotion regulation on early eating behaviors. Eating Behaviors, 15, 403–409. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2014.04.013

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, 41–54. https://doi.org/10.1023/b:joba.0000007455.08539.94

Gross, J. J., & Muñoz, R. F. (1995). Emotion regulation and mental health. Clinical Psychology, 2, 151–164. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2850.1995.tb00036.x

Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive–behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford Press.

Mennin, D. S., Heimberg, R. G., Turk, C. L., & Fresco, D. M. (2002). Applying an emotion regulation framework to integrative approaches to generalized anxiety disorder. Clinical Psychology, 9, 85–90. https://doi.org/10.1093/clipsy.9.1.85

Ostlund, B. O., Vlisides-Henry, R. D., Crowell, S. E., Raby, L. K., Terrell, S., Brown, M., …Conradt, E. (2019). Intergenerational transmission of emotion dysregulation: Part II. Developmental origins of newborn neurobehavioral risk for psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 31, 833–846. doi:10.1017/S0954579419000440

Rutherford, H. J., Wallace, N. S., Laurent, H. K., & Mayes, L. C. (2015). Emotion regulation in parenthood. Developmental Review, 36, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2014.12.008