Parental beliefs about positive affect and parental depressive symptoms predicting parents' positive emotion socialisation in India.

Abstract

Emerging literature examines implications of parental socialisation of positive affect (PA) for children's socio‐emotional functioning, though little is known about predictors of parental PA socialisation behaviours in diverse families around the world. Based on the literature that suggests that parental cognitions (Okagaki & Bingham, 2005) and their own mood state contribute to their parenting (Dix & Meunier, 2009), we examined two parent‐related factors (parental beliefs regarding PA and depressive symptoms) as predictors of parental responses to their adolescents' PA in an urban middle‐class sample of mothers and fathers from India (N = 267; 40.4% mothers). Parents completed measures of their PA‐related beliefs, depressive symptomatology, and their responses to adolescents' PA at two‐time points, 5 months apart. Parental PA‐related beliefs showed low stability and depressive symptoms showed moderate stability across time. There were concurrent bivariate associations between parental PA‐related beliefs and their socialisation behaviours, though these relations did not hold in multivariate path analyses across time. Parental depressive symptoms at T1 inversely predicted family savouring at T2 and positively predicted dampening at T2. These findings provide the first line of evidence indicating that parental cognitions and their own mood contribute to their emotion‐related parenting behaviours in India.