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Three-year Trajectories of Emotional Expressiveness among Maltreating Mothers: The Role of Life Changes

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Abstract

Parents are perhaps the most direct and profound influences on children’s development of emotional competence. For example, how and what emotions parents express in the family has implications for children’s ability to understand and regulate their emotions. What is less well understood is what potential environmental or contextual factors impact parents’ emotional expressiveness, particularly in high-risk samples prone to atypical emotional expressiveness (e.g., deficits in the production and recognition of emotional expressions). The present longitudinal study examined the association between life changes and parents’ expression of positive and negative emotions, as well as, how these associations changed over time in a sample of maltreating mothers. Eighty-eight mothers with a substantiated history of physical abuse completed measures of emotional expressiveness and life changes experienced over the past 6 months when their children were in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Results indicated that life changes decreased over time, while parental emotional expressiveness remained stable. Moreover, life changes were associated across time with the expression of negative emotions, but were unrelated to expressions of positive emotions. Findings have important implications for understanding emotional expressiveness in high-risk samples.

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Funding

This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [Grant number K01 HD043299] awarded to the second author. This work was also supported by a postdoctoral fellowship provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (T32-HD07376) through the Center for Developmental Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to H. M. Milojevich. The authors would like to thank Amy Halberstadt for her contributions to the manuscript.

Author Contributions

M.H.: designed and executed the study, oversaw data entry and coding, and collaborated in the writing and editing of the manuscript. H.M.: conducted all analyses and wrote the manuscript.

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  1. Center for Developmental Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 100 East Franklin St., Chapel Hill, NC, 27514, USA

    Helen M. Milojevich

  2. Department of Psychology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27607, USA

    Mary E. Haskett

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  1. Helen M. Milojevich
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Correspondence to Helen M. Milojevich.

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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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Milojevich, H.M., Haskett, M.E. Three-year Trajectories of Emotional Expressiveness among Maltreating Mothers: The Role of Life Changes. J Child Fam Stud 27, 141–153 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0858-6

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