Dynamic, bidirectional influences of children's emotions and maternal regulatory strategies

The current study examined temporal associations between child emotion and maternal regulatory strategies in mother-child dyads. One hundred and 30 mothers and their 5-year-old children (46.1% boys) completed a challenging puzzle task, which was videotaped. Child positive and negative emotion as well as mothers' regulatory strategies including problem solving, providing approval, and comforting, were coded on a second-by-second basis from the videos. Multilevel modeling analyses were conducted to examine how maternal behaviors at a given time predicted the within-dyad variations of child positive and negative emotion 2 seconds later, controlling for the child's own prior emotion, as well as child emotion predicting subsequent maternal behaviors 2 seconds later, controlling for mothers' prior behaviors. In all models, child sex and negative emotionality as well as maternal depressive symptoms were included as between-dyad predictors, whereas maternal race and education were included as covariates. Results suggested that maternal approval and problem solving predicted within-dyad variation in subsequent child positive emotion. Both child positive and negative emotion was predictive of the within-dyad variation in mothers' subsequent use of strategies. Maternal depressive symptoms moderated the relations between prior and subsequent strategy uses for all three maternal behaviors. Our findings indicated that child emotion regulates, and is regulated by, maternal regulatory strategies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).