Sentiment analysis of parent-child emotion synchrony: The role of child temperament

Parent-child emotion synchrony plays a critical role in children's emotional development, yet most existing research has been conducted in laboratory settings with limited ecological validity. This study drew on data collected between 2014 and 2018 and used daylong, naturalistic audio recordings and sentiment analysis to examine real-time verbalized emotion synchrony between preschool-aged children and both mothers and fathers during everyday interactions at home. Eighty-four families participated, with 1-min audio recordings captured every 10 min using wearable recording devices. Sentiment scores were derived from transcribed speech using Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner, a lexicon-based sentiment analysis tool, and used to compute momentary emotional valence for each family member. Multilevel models tested whether parent momentary emotional valence predicted child momentary emotional valence at the same moment and whether child temperament (negative emotionality, effortful control, and extraversion) moderated these associations. Results revealed that both mother-child and father-child dyads exhibited emotion synchrony when children expressed positive emotion but only for children with average or high levels of negative emotionality (mother-child) or extraversion (father-child). In negative emotion contexts, exploratory analyses indicated that emotion synchrony was observed only between fathers and children and only for children with low or average effortful control. Findings highlight how child temperament shapes emotion coregulation processes in naturalistic environments and underscore the need to consider parent gender, emotional context, and individual child characteristics in understanding emotional dynamics in families. The study also demonstrates the utility of naturalistic, audio-based approaches for capturing subtle affective processes as they unfold in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).