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Longitudinal Effects of Reminiscing and Emotion Training on Child Maladjustment in the Context of Maltreatment and Maternal Depressive Symptoms

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Abstract

Exposure to child maltreatment and maternal depression are significant risk factors for the development of psychopathology. Difficulties in caregiving, including poor emotion socialization behavior, may mediate these associations. Thus, enhancing supportive parent emotion socialization may be a key transdiagnostic target for preventive interventions designed for these families. Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) is a brief relational intervention designed to improve maternal emotion socialization behavior by enhancing maltreating mothers’ sensitive guidance during reminiscing with their young children. This study evaluated associations between maltreatment, maternal depressive symptoms, and the RET intervention with changes in children’s maladjustment across one year following the intervention, and examined the extent to which intervention-related improvement in maternal emotion socialization mediated change in children’s maladjustment. Participants were 242 children (aged 36 to 86 months) and their mothers from maltreating (66%) and nonmaltreating (34%) families. Results indicated that RET intervention-related improvement in maternal sensitive guidance mediated the effects of RET on reduced child maladjustment among maltreated children one year later. By comparison, poor sensitive guidance mediated the effects of maltreatment on higher child maladjustment among families that did not receive the RET intervention. Direct effects of maternal depressive symptoms on child maladjustment were also observed. This suggests RET is effective in facilitating emotional and behavioral adjustment in maltreated children by improving maltreating mothers’ emotional socialization behaviors.

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Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Heidi Miller and the H2H2 project staff for their invaluable assistance with this project. Additionally, we are grateful to the children and families that participated in this study and the Department of Child Services of St. Joseph County. This research was supported by grants R01 HD071933 and R01HD091235 to K. Valentino. A full list of publications supported by these grants can be found at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/kristin.valentino.1/bibliography/public/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Kristin Valentino, Ruth Speidel, Kaitlin Fondren, Brigid Behrens, Katherine Edler, Kreila Cote & E. Mark Cummings

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  1. Kristin Valentino
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  2. Ruth Speidel
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  3. Kaitlin Fondren
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Correspondence to Kristin Valentino.

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The data for the current study are part of a larger project, approved by the University of Notre Dame Institutional Review Board and granted approval number 12-06-376.

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Valentino, K., Speidel, R., Fondren, K. et al. Longitudinal Effects of Reminiscing and Emotion Training on Child Maladjustment in the Context of Maltreatment and Maternal Depressive Symptoms. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol 50, 13–25 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-021-00794-0

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