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Updated: Oct 1, 2025
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Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
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Parents' expressed emotions and children's executive functions
1Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|March 7, 2022
Summary
Parental communication styles impact child development. Fathers' criticism and over-involvement negatively affected children's executive functions, while mothers' positive relationship quality supported working memory in toddlers.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Family Studies
- Clinical Psychology
Background:
- Expressed emotions (EE) in family members predict psychiatric disorder relapse and prognosis.
- Previous EE research focused on parents of older children (4-18 years) with emotional/behavioral dysregulation.
- The EE construct has not been applied to parents of typically developing infants.
Purpose of the Study:
- To apply an EE coding paradigm to speech samples from mothers and fathers of 14-month-old typically developing children.
- To investigate the association between parental expressed emotions and infant executive functions.
- To explore parental thoughts, attitudes, and feelings towards their infants.
Main Methods:
- Collected speech samples from 104 mothers and fathers regarding their 14-month-old children.
- Coded speech samples for critical comments, emotional over-involvement, and quality of relationship.
- Assessed children's executive functions (inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility) via tasks.
Main Results:
- Fathers' criticism negatively correlated with children's inhibition.
- Fathers' emotional over-involvement negatively correlated with children's working memory.
- Mothers' positive quality of relationship positively correlated with children's working memory.
Conclusions:
- Parental speech patterns offer insights into infant cognitive development.
- This study extends the EE paradigm to early development in typically developing children.
- Analyzing parental communication can reveal early predictors of child executive function.
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