Child temperament and emotion socialization by parents and its influence on emotion regulation by children

Abstract

Background: Socialization processes are among the many influences which affect the development of individual differences in emotion regulation, along with biological predispositions and inclinations. Through this study, an attempt is being made to see how temperament, conceptualized as a biological construct and emotion socialization, an environmental variable, interact together and how they influence the use of specific emotion regulation strategies by the children. The study looked at exploring patterns of emotion socialization by parents, the temperament of children, emotion regulation by children and the interaction between these three variables. Method: The study was conducted on a sample of 52 children aged between 10-12 years and their parents taken from a private school in Delhi. Data was collected using three questionnaires. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA) was administered to the children to assess their use of two emotion regulation strategies – Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression. The Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES) was used to assess parental responses to children’s expression of negative emotions and the School age temperament inventory (SATI) was used to assess the temperament of the children on four dimensions. Both these questionnaires were filled up by the parents. The data was analysed quantitatively using descriptive data, correlations, t-tests and regression analysis. Results: Emotion regulation was not significantly related to emotion socialization by parents or with temperament. Multiple regression also did not find a significant predictive value. However, significant correlations were found between specific temperamental characteristics of the child and the use of parental responses to the child’s negative emotions. Conclusion: The study emphasized the need for studying emotion socialization as a comprehensive construct and understanding the relationship between temperament of the child and emotion socialization practices within a goodness-of-fit model. The findings have implications for looking at the unique cultural context within which the processes of emotion socialization and emotion regulation are embedded to foster more efficacious and customized interventions in the field of child development and mental health.