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Family Expressiveness Mediates the Relation Between Cumulative Family Risks and Children’s Emotion Regulation in a Chinese Sample

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Abstract

Family expressiveness, a reflection of a family’s emotional environment, has been identified as a critical factor that influences children’s emotion regulation, yet research on this topic is limited, especially in varying cultural contexts. The present study addresses this research gap and expands on the extant literature by examining the influence of family expressiveness on children’s emotional development in the context of cumulative risks (e.g., low annual household income, parental psychological distress, parents’ education level, marital dissatisfaction and the family’s housing situation). Our final sample included one hundred and seventy-eight school-aged children (84 boys and 94 girls) and their biological parents. Results showed that higher scores on the familial risk index were related to increased emotion dysregulation and decreased adaptive emotion regulation, through the mediated effects of positive family expressiveness. Negative expressiveness, however, did not mediate the aforementioned links. Reasons for the different findings regarding positive expressiveness and negative expressiveness were discussed. These findings highlight the importance of cumulative risk on children’s emotional development in the Chinese cultural context and offer potential avenues to promote adaptive emotional development in the context of cumulative risks.

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Acknowledgments

This study received support from Natural Science Foundation of Beijing (5144028) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (31500898). We thank Prof. Lei Chang’s team at CUHK and Prof. Yiyuan Xu for sharing the translation of ERC in Chinese with us.

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  1. Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Mengyu Gao & Zhuo Rachel Han

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  1. Mengyu Gao
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Gao, M., Han, Z.R. Family Expressiveness Mediates the Relation Between Cumulative Family Risks and Children’s Emotion Regulation in a Chinese Sample. J Child Fam Stud 25, 1570–1580 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-015-0335-z

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