Maternal responses to children's negative emotions in real-world settings: A diathesis-stress approach

Adopting a diathesis-stress framework, we examined whether maternal trait-level distress reactivity (the tendency to experience poorly regulated anxiety or discomfort in response to children's negative emotions) interacted with the intensity of children's negative emotions to predict the quality of mothers' subsequent responses in real-world settings. With a sample of 53 families with a child between 3 and 5 years old (M_{child age} = 50.47 months, 28 girls), we collected 16-hr audio recordings of children in the home. From the recordings, multiple emotional episodes (range = 4-10 episodes, M = 9.47, SD = 1.34) per child were selected to code for children's negative emotional intensity and the quality of mothers' subsequent response (i.e., support and nonsupport). We also computed the percentage of maternal positive and negative emotion words for each maternal response using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. Mothers reported on their tendency to experience distress in response to their child's negative emotions and general difficulties with emotion regulation. Multilevel models revealed that increases in children's negative emotional intensity were associated with real-time increases in maternal nonsupport and decreases in maternal positive emotion talk, but only for mothers who reported high trait levels of distress reactivity. These findings emerged after controlling for maternal difficulties with emotion regulation. Findings highlight the importance of examining how maternal trait-level emotional characteristics in the parenting context interact with situational stressors (e.g., intensity of children's negative emotional expressions) to predict specific parenting behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).