Maternal Autonomy Support in a Randomized Controlled Trial of the Reminiscing and Emotion Training Intervention

The Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) intervention targets and improves maltreating mothers' elaboration and sensitivity in reminiscing (conversations about past emotional events), as well as children's emotion knowledge. However, in previous studies of RET, improvements in mothers' elaborative and sensitive reminiscing did not explain improvements in children's emotion knowledge. Thus, we evaluated whether RET is associated with improved maternal autonomy support during reminiscing and whether improved autonomy support is associated with enhanced child emotion knowledge after RET.

The sample included 248 mothers (165 maltreating and 83 nonmaltreating) and their 3- to 6-year-old children involved in a randomized controlled trial of RET. At baseline, we assessed maternal and child receptive language, dyadic reminiscing, and children's emotion knowledge. Then, maltreating mothers were randomized either to receive RET or participate in an active control condition including case management and written parenting materials. Nonmaltreating mothers did not receive intervention and participated as an additional control group. Families then completed an eight-week follow-up assessment.

Maltreating mothers displayed significantly less baseline autonomy support during reminiscing than nonmaltreating mothers (partial eta squared = .028). Contrary to hypotheses, RET did not significantly improve autonomy support. However, baseline autonomy support was significantly and positively correlated with children's emotion knowledge at baseline (r = .20) and follow-up (r = .18).

Autonomy support during reminiscing may play a role in the development of emotion knowledge. Implications for developmental theory and clinical practice are discussed.