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Development and Validation of the Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) Questionnaire

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Abstract

Caregivers play a central role in promoting emotion regulation throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence. However, there are no existing psychometric measures to assess how parents assist children in employing emotion regulation strategies for negative emotions. We therefore developed the Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) Questionnaire to assess the degree to which parents assist their children in their use of ten different regulation strategies. In this paper, we describe the development of the PACER and examine its psychometric properties (N = 407 parents of children ages birth to 17 years). In so doing, we also use the PACER to comprehensively explore the links between parent-assisted emotion regulation and indices of parent and child stress, symptomatology, and attachment. Confirmatory factor analyses of the PACER items supported its intended ten-factor structure (corresponding to ten specific regulation strategies), which was invariant across different child age and sex categories. PACER scale scores had excellent internal consistency and generally acceptable test–retest reliability over a one-week period. Convergent validity was established via correlations between PACER scales and indices of parental emotion sensitivity, expressivity, and regulation, as well as parents’ perception of the efficacy of their assistance with children’s execution of emotion regulatory strategies. Lower parental facilitation of stereotypically adaptive emotion regulatory strategies was associated with higher child internalizing and externalizing problems and with poorer parent–child relationship quality. Overall, these findings suggest that the PACER may be a useful tool for the assessment of parental assistance with child emotion regulation across development.

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Data Availability

All study data is available by request from the corresponding author.

Notes

  1. Previous versions of the PACER (described in greater detail in the SM) included items in each strategy-specific scale that were designed to test parents’ regulation efficacy.

  2. If analyses are run on a reduced sample (n = 350) that excludes children under 3 years of age, the pattern of results remains the same. Ten-factor model: CFI = .973, RMSEA = .030 (.026-.033), SRMR = .047, AIC = 43,132.391.

  3. CBCL raw scores were used in the present study given the inclusion of children under 18 months of age. In addition to the correlations presented in Table 5, all analyses involving the CBCL were re-run using a hierarchical multiple regression framework controlling for child age and sex. Results of these analyses yielded an identical pattern of results to the correlation results presented in Table 5, with the exception of a significant positive association between parental assistance with expressive suppression and externalizing problems in the 1.5–5 sample when controlling for child age and sex.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Luise Pruessner, Paola Odriozola, and Jason Haberman for their contributions to initial brainstorming about the development of the PACER and Krystal Augustine, Natalie Daumeyer, and Camila Caballero for their assistance with the MTurk platform. Finally, the authors would like to acknowledge the undergraduate research assistants who contributed to form creation, code development, and table creation: Uma Raul, Ana Greenberg, and Hannah Logan.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Early Independence Award (DP5OD021370) to D.G.G., Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression; NARSAD) Young Investigator Award to D.G.G., Jacobs Foundation Early Career Research Fellowship to D.G.G., The Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (Division 53 of the American Psychological Association) Richard "Dick" Abidin Early Career Award and Grant to D.G.G., NSF GRFP Award (NSF DGE1752134) to E.M.C., The Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (Division 53 of the American Psychological Association) Donald Routh Dissertation Grant to E.M.C., the American Psychological Foundation Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Child Psychology Graduate Fellowship to E.M.C., a Dissertation Funding Award from the Society for Research in Child Development to E.M.C., and a Dissertation Research Award from the American Psychological Association to E.M.C.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA

    Emily M. Cohodes, Sarah McCauley, Marisa K. Rogers & Dylan G. Gee

  2. School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University, Kent Street, Bentley, Perth, WA, 6102, Australia

    David A. Preece

  3. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Jordan Hall, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 420, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    James J. Gross

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  1. Emily M. Cohodes
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection were performed by Emily Cohodes, Sarah McCauley, and Dylan Gee. Analysis was performed by David Preece and Emily Cohodes, with input from Dylan Gee and James Gross. Emily Cohodes, David Preece, Marisa Rogers, and Sarah McCauley created all tables and appendices for the manuscript. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Emily Cohodes, and all authors made substantive contributions to manuscript revisions. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Dylan G. Gee.

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Cohodes, E.M., Preece, D.A., McCauley, S. et al. Development and Validation of the Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) Questionnaire. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol 50, 133–148 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-020-00759-9

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