Developmental studies consistently indicate that parents have the primary role in shaping a child’s emotional development, by their direct and indirect, verbal or nonverbal messages addressed to their children. Dealing with anger, happiness, fear or sadness are emotional and social daily lessons that put together parent and child in a positive or negative interaction with implications for their development and wellbeing.
According to the tripartite model of parental influences (Morris et al., 2007), the family context impacts emotional development through three pathways: the emotional climate, the parenting style and the emotional quality of marital relationships. Parent-child interactions, with all its components, (parents' reactions to the child’s emotions), whether supportive (e.g. reward) or unsupportive (e.g. punishment, neglect) are reflected in their emotional life and represent an important predictor for the development of emotion regulation (Kullik & Petermann, 2013) and wellbeing (Root & Denham, 2010; Houltberg et al., 2012). Thus, parental emotion socialization is a process that helps a child to identify and appropriately express and manage their emotions, due to the parents’ reactions to their child’s emotions. Retrospective reports of adolescents have shown that parental socialization emotional strategies project emotional effects into adulthood. The Malatesta-Magai model of parental style of emotion socialization (Malatesta-Magai, 1991), that defined the concepts and variables of this study, delimits five strategies, used by parents when it comes to emotion socialization: reward, punishment, override, neglect and magnify.
From a functionalist approach, emotion socialization implies responses to concrete emotions. In this research, we will analyze anger and happiness, because a number of studies have identified the existence of core emotions relevant for emotional development, frequently implied in internalization or externalization problems (Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007; Zeman et al., 2010). Anger is an emotion that communicates a need for limits and rules and activates a defense system. Happiness functions as a signal to make some activities that bring personal satisfaction, promote positive relationships through emotional contagion and wellbeing ((Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007).
According to a processual model of emotion regulation, (Gross, 1998) there are lots of strategies that can intervene in different moments of emotional experience: anterior-focused, like situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment and cognitive change or response-focused that can be a response modulation. A specific type of cognitive change is cognitive reappraisal (CR) and, for response modulation, there is expressive suppression (ER). CR and ES are two strategies with multiple implications for mental health and wellbeing.
A person who activates CR tends to negotiate stressful events by interpreting them in an optimistic manner (John & Gross, 2004; Haga et al., 2009) and have a high level of life satisfaction and self-esteem, a lower level of anxiety, depression or posttraumatic stress disorder (Zimmer-Gembeck et al., 2022); Miklósi et al., 2014; Kullik & Petermann, 2013). ES involves the inhibition of emotion expression and leads to a series of psychological consequences, like both externalizing and internalizing problems in early childhood, through adolescence and emerging adulthood (Buckner et al., 2003; (Cheung et al., 2019).
Although together, all these theories and models explain the emotional impact of parents with regards their child’s development; it is important to extend knowledge by examining the role of emotion regulation strategies, like protective factors, between parental influences and distress (Cloitre et al., 2019).
Problem statement
Parental emotion socialization and its emotional consequences
Significant correlations between negative emotions socialization and internalization issues are a constant of several studies; thus, sadness or fear, punishment or neglect, were associated with high levels of psychological distress in adulthood (Brand & Klimes-Dougan, 2010); Silk & House, 2011; Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007). Punishment of positive emotions correlates with high levels of distress, while reward is associated with lower levels of distress (Ramakrishnan et al., 2019).
Although the topic of emotion socialization is important and relevant in multiple areas of psychology, there are few studies that have examined the socialization process of specific negative (e.g. fear, anger) or positive emotions (e.g. happiness), separately by the mother and father (Root & Denham, 2010). Furthermore, there is relative extensive research on negative emotions and a lack of research in positive socialization emotions (Ramakrishnan et al., 2019).
Despite the Gottman and colleagues’ results (Gottman et al., 1996), that emphasized a stronger role of the father’s attitude in outcome of the child, there are few studies regarding emotion socialization, separately by the mother and father. Although there are concordant findings suggesting that a mother’s focus and implication is deeper in relation with their child’s emotion than the father (Cheung et al., 2019; Baker et al., 2011; Brand & Klimes-Dougan, 2010; Zeman et al., 2010), the data regarding the long-term implications of the mother and fathers’ emotional behavior reported mixed results. A meta-analysis highlighted that paternal psychopathology is more related to children’s emotional and behavioral problems than maternal psychopathology (Connell & Goodman, 2002), and paternal emotion socialization is more consistently related to psychopathology of daughters (Garside, 2004). A father’s response to their child’s emotion has a powerful relation to the child’s emotional skills (Baker et al., 2011). More exactly, a father’s acceptance attitude towards their child’s sadness and anger at five years is associated with better social skills at eight years (Cassano et al., 2007). Based on this finding, we formulated the first objective of this present research: to analyze the relation between anger and happiness socialization in childhood and their effects on adolescents and emerging adults’ distress, by conducting a separate analysis for the mother and father.
Emotion regulation strategies as mediators
Recent research investigated the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies between parental responses to a child’s emotions and emotional consequences in adolescence and adulthood (Scott & Hakim-Larson, 2021; Bertie et al., 2021; Cheung et al., 2019; Kullik & Petermann, 2013) but, there is a lack of evidence concerning specific analyses, like separate investigations for mothers and fathers in the case of specific emotions (e.g. anger, fear, happiness, sadness). For example, in a family with different maternal and paternal nonconsensual parents’ responses to a specific emotion, it is difficult to build coherent emotional behavior and adaptative emotion regulation strategies (Cheung et al., 2019). The quality of parent-child interactions has profound implications for the expression and regulation of emotions that can become a mediating variable between parental influences and distress or wellbeing (Jaffe et al., 2010; Cheung et al., 2019). In this context, recent research shows interest in responsible mechanisms when it comes to the relation between parental influences and emotional development (Kullik & Petermann, 2013) and suggests the role of emotion regulation like a mediating variable be studied. Summarizing these findings, we established the second objective: to analyze the relation between maternal and paternal emotion socialization in childhood and their effects on adolescents and emerging adults’ distress, taking into account the mediational role of both parents’ cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, as emotion regulation strategies.
Research questions
Due to the impact of emotional experiences during childhood on mental health (McLafferty et al., 2020; Cheung et al., 2019; Kullik & Petermann, 2013), it is useful to investigate the mediator’s role of emotion regulation between emotional experiences during childhood and emotional life during adolescence or early adulthood. Based on the tripartite model of family (Morris et al., 2007), related with the Malatesta-Magai model of parental strategies of emotion socialization (Malatesta-Magai, 1991), a functionalist approach of emotions and the processual model of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998), we tested four mediation models in order to answer the question whether emotion regulation strategies can mediate the positive (see Fig. 1) and negative (see Fig. 2) parental impacts in childhood, separate for the mother and father, regarding distress in adolescence and emerging adulthood, in relation to two distinct emotions: anger and happiness. This present study expands the existing literature in three important ways: 1. The role of explanatory mechanisms in the relationship between parental strategies for emotional socialization during childhood and distress in adolescence and emerging adulthood that has been less researched. 2. Secondly, one major limitation of the previous research on parental emotional socialization and adolescent distress is the almost exclusive focus on mothers (Burniston et al., 2023), although there are several significant results about the fathers’ parenting and emotional consequences (Byrd-Craven et al., 2012). 3. Thirdly, it is important to understand the links between parenting and child emotional outcomes in the cultural context, The relationship between these variables being studied more in the western, individualistic cultures and less in eastern, collectivist ones. Additionally, in the last twenty years, there has been a paradigm change in the eastern culture from an authoritarian parenting style to an authoritative parenting style, emphasizing children’s wellbeing and less distress (Turliuc & Marici, 2013).
In relationship with our research objectives, four hypotheses were proposed:
Hypothesis 1
The relation between negative anger, socialization (mother & father) and distress is mediated by emotion regulation (expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal).
Hypothesis 2
The relation between positive anger socialization (mother & father) and distress is mediated by emotion regulation (expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal).
Hypothesis 3
The relation between negative happiness’ socialization (mother & father) and distress is mediated by emotion regulation (expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal).
Hypothesis 4
The relation between positive happiness socialization (mother & father) and distress is mediated by emotion regulation (expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal).