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The Relations of Parental Emotion Dysregulation and Emotion Socialization to Young Adults’ Emotion Dysregulation

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Abstract

Objectives

Parents’ own emotion dysregulation and their socialization of emotions have been found to predict offspring’s emotion dysregulation, but little is known about how these factors interact to predict young adults’ emotion dysregulation. Thus, we aimed to examine whether each of three forms of parental responses to their offspring’s negative emotions (i.e., supportive, harsh, distressed) predicted young adults’ emotion dysregulation, particularly for young adults whose parents did not present emotional difficulties.

Methods

One hundred and twenty-two young adults (Mage = 22.37 years, SDage = 2.23, age range: 18–26 years) and their primary parents were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Young adults and their primary parents reported on their own emotion dysregulation, and primary parents reported their supportive, harsh, and distressed responses to young adults’ negative emotions.

Results

For distressed parental responses and supportive emotion-related socialization, the interaction effect between emotion dysregulation and their emotion socialization strategies was significantly related to young adults’ emotion dysregulation, Fs(6) = 6.70 and 6.58, ps < 0.001, for distressed responses and supportive socialization, respectively. When parents’ harsh responses to negative emotions were examined, only the main effects of harsh responses and parents’ own emotion dysregulation predicted young adults’ emotion dysregulation, F(5) = 4.55, p < 0.001.

Conclusions

Results highlight that both specific socialization strategies and parents’ own regulatory characteristics are important in young adults’ emotional experience. Further, if parents are not well-regulated emotionally, changes in their responses to young adults’ negative emotions may not be effective.

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Author Contributions

X.X.: designed and executed the study, analyzed the data, and wrote the paper. T.S.: assisted with the data analyses and assisted in writing and editing of the manuscript. J.C.: collaborated with the design and writing of the study. D.M.: collaborated with the design and executing and writing of the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Xiaoye Xu & Tracy L. Spinrad

  2. Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Jeffrey T. Cookston & David Matsumoto

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  1. Xiaoye Xu
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  2. Tracy L. Spinrad
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  3. Jeffrey T. Cookston
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Correspondence to Xiaoye Xu.

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This research involved human subjects and was approved by the Institutional Review Board of San Francisco State University. “All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.”

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Xu, X., Spinrad, T.L., Cookston, J.T. et al. The Relations of Parental Emotion Dysregulation and Emotion Socialization to Young Adults’ Emotion Dysregulation. J Child Fam Stud 29, 725–737 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01619-x

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