Abstract
Parents play a primary and crucial role in emotional socialisation processes in children where individuals learn the expression, understanding and regulation of emotions. Parenting practices and dimensions of the parent-child relationship have been associated with social and emotional processes in children. As criticism involves negative emotional reactions and emotion regulation, the parent-child relationship is likely to influence an individual's perception and response to criticism. Hence, the present study investigated the relationship of parental bonding and the perception and response to criticism in three different countries-Singapore, Italy and USA. Adult participants (n = 444) completed the Parental Bonding Inventory (PBI) and measures of criticism. Parental care, overprotection and country were found to be significant predictors of a tendency to perceive criticism as destructive. Higher levels of parental care predicted a lower tendency to perceive criticism as destructive while higher levels of parental overprotection predicted a higher tendency to perceive criticism as destructive. US American participants were found to have a significantly higher tendency to perceive criticism as destructive compared to Italian and Singaporean participants. The findings align with past research on the role of the parent-child relationship in the socio-emotional development of children as well as providing insight into a specific aspect in social interaction; perception and response to criticism, being affected. Future studies can look to investigate this relationship further in different countries in light of cultural variation in parenting styles and emotion experience, expression and regulation.
Highlights
Through emotional socialisation, individuals learn to express, understand, and regulate emotion during childhood [1], and these abilities are closely linked to social interactions of children [2]
The present study aims to investigate the relationship between parental bonding and the perception and response to criticism in samples from three different countries–Singapore, Italy and the United States of America (USA)
Scores of the different measures of criticism; (i) Sensitivity to Criticism scale (SCS), (ii) Attributions of Criticism Scale (ACS) Positive, (iii) ACS Negative and (iv) Perceived criticism (PC) were submitted to a principal components analysis
Summary
Individuals learn to express, understand, and regulate emotion during childhood [1], and these abilities are closely linked to social interactions of children [2]. Emotions are learned within the family too, where parents play a primary role [3] and children learn about emotions and emotion regulation through their parents’ responses to their emotions [4]. In a heuristic model put forth by [1], parental emotion-related socialisation.
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