Abstract
Studies show that mothers with depression are more likely to engage in unsupportive emotion-related socialization behaviors, and mothers’ negative emotion socialization can interfere with the development of emotion regulation in children. However, insufficient studies examine the relationship between mothers’ depressive symptoms, emotion socialization, and children’s emotion regulation. The present study used short-term longitudinal data to investigate the mediating role of maternal emotion socialization on the effect of maternal depressive symptoms on children’s emotion regulation. Participants included 180 mothers of six-to-12-year-old children. First, we measured maternal depressive symptoms and mothers’ reactions to their children’s negative emotions, operationalizing emotion socialization. Then we collected data about the children’s emotion regulation reported by mothers six months later. A structured equation modeling analysis indicated that maternal emotion socialization completely mediated the impact of mothers’ depressive symptoms on children’s emotion regulation with a significant indirect effect. The present study used short-term longitudinal data and highlighted the significant impact of mothers’ depressive symptoms on children’s emotion regulation mediated by maternal emotion socialization. The results suggest a need for early detection and appropriate intervention of mothers’ depressive symptoms. Even for mothers with depression, efforts to recognize and improve their emotion-related parenting behavior could be helpful for their children.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
The data set is available upon request.
Code Availability
Not applicable.
References
Bao, J., & Kato, M. (2020). Determinants of maternal emotion socialization: Based on Belsky’s process of parenting model. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02044.
Boedeker, K., Fuchs, A., Fuehrer, D., Kluczniok, D., Dittrich, K., Reichl, C., Reck, C., Kaess, M., Hindi Attar, C., Moehler, E., Neukel, C., Bierbaum, A., Zietlow, A., Jaite, C., Lehmkuhl, U., Winter, S. M., Herpertz, S., Brunner, R., Bermpohl, F., & Resch, F. (2019). Impact of maternal early life maltreatment and maternal history of depression on child psychopathology: Mediating role of maternal sensitivity? Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 50(2), 278–290. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-018-0839-z.
Breaux, R. P., Harvey, E. A., & Lugo-Candelas, C. I. (2016). The role of parent psychopathology in emotion socialization. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 44(4), 731–743. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-015-0062-3.
Breaux, R. P., McQuade, J. D., Harvey, E. A., & Zakarian, R. J. (2018). Longitudinal associations of parental emotion socialization and children’s emotion regulation: The moderating role of ADHD symptomatology. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 46(4), 671–683. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-017-0327-0.
Briscoe, C., Stack, D. M., Dickson, D. J., & Serbin, L. A. (2019). Maternal emotion socialization mediates the relationship between maternal and adolescent negative emotionality. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48(3), 495–509. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-018-0945-z.
Choi, J. Y., & Oh, K. J. (2014). Cumulative childhood trauma and psychological maladjustment of sexually abused children in Korea: Mediating effects of emotion regulation. Child Abuse & Neglect, 38(2), 296–303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2013.09.009.
Cole, P. M., Dennis, T. A., Smith-Simon, K. E., & Cohen, L. H. (2009). Preschoolers’ emotion regulation strategy understanding: Relations with emotion socialization and child self-regulation. Social Development, 18(2), 324–352. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9507.2008.00503.x.
Eaton, W. W., Smith, C., Ybarra, M., Muntaner, C., & Tien, A. (2004). Center for epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale: Review and revision (CESD and CESD-R). In M. E. Maruish (Ed.), The use of psychological testing for treatment planning and outcomes assessment: Instruments for adults (pp. 363–377). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Eisenberg, N., Cumberland, A., & Spinrad, T. L. (1998). Parental socialization of emotion. Psychological Inquiry, 9(4), 241–273. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli0904_1.
Eisenberg, N., Cumberland, A., Spinrad, T. L., Fabes, R. A., Shepard, S. A., Reiser, M., & Guthrie, I. K. (2001). The relations of regulation and emotionality to children’s externalizing and internalizing problem behavior. Child Development, 72(4), 1112–1134. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00337.
Fabes, R. A., Eisenberg, N., & Bernzwing, J. (1990). The comping with children’s negative emotion scale: Procedures and scoring [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Arizona State University, Tempe, USA.
Fabes, R. A., Leonard, S. A., Kupanoff, K., & Martin, C. L. (2001). Parental coping with children’s negative emotions: Relations with children’s emotional and social responding. Child Development, 72(3), 907–920. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00323.
Feng, X., Shaw, D. S., Kovacs, M., Lane, T., O’Rourke, F. E., & Alarcon, J. H. (2008). Emotion regulation in preschoolers: The roles of behavioral inhibition, maternal affective behavior, and maternal depression. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 49(2), 132–141. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2007.01828.x.
Gibb, B. E., Grassia, M., Stone, L. B., Uhrlass, D. J., & McGeary, J. E. (2012). Brooding rumination and risk for depressive disorders in children of depressed mothers. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 40(2), 317–326. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-011-9554-y.
Goodman, S. H. (2007). Depression in mothers. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 3, 107–135. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.3.022806.091401.
Goodman, S. H., Rouse, M. H., Connell, A. M., Broth, M. R., Hall, C. M., & Heyward, D. (2011). Maternal depression and child psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 14(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-010-0080-1.
Hastings, P., Klimes-Dougan, B., Kendziora, K., Brand, A., & Zahn-Waxler, C. (2014). Regulating sadness and fear from outside and within: Mothers’ emotion socialization and adolescents’ parasympathetic regulation predict the development of internalizing difficulties. Development and Psychopathology, 26(4pt2), 1369–1384. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579414001084.
Hoffman, C., Crnic, K. A., & Baker, J. K. (2006). Maternal depression and parenting: Implications for children’s emergent emotion regulation and behavioral functioning. Parenting: Science and Practice, 6(4), 271–295. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327922par0604_1.
Hooper, E. G., Wu, Q., Ku, S., Gerhardt, M., & Feng, X. (2018). Maternal emotion socialization and child outcomes among african Americans and European Americans. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 27(6), 1870–1880. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-018-1020-9.
Jones, S., Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., & MacKinnon, D. P. (2002). Parents’ reactions to elementary school children’s negative emotions: Relations to social and emotional functioning at school. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 48(2), 133–159. https://doi.org/10.1353/mpq.2002.0007.
Kessler, R. C., & Bromet, E. J. (2013). The epidemiology of depression across cultures. Annual Review of Public Health, 34, 119–138. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031912-114409.
Kim, H. J. (1995). Mother’s perception of children’s coping with negative emotions [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Sookmyung Women’s University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Kuckertz, J. M., Mitchell, C., & Wiggins, J. L. (2018). Parenting mediates the impact of maternal depression on child internalizing symptoms. Depression and Anxiety, 35(1), 89–97. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.22688.
Labella, M., Ruiz, S., Harris, S., & Klimes-Dougan, B. (2021). Emotion socialization in mothers with mood disorders: Affective modeling and recollected responses to childhood emotion. Development and Psychopathology, 33(4), 1156–1169. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579420000395.
Lee, H., Oh, S., Lee, K., & Park, J. Y. (2016). Validation of the korean version of Center for epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale-Revised. Cambridge University Press.
Lin, B., Kaliush, P., Conradt, E., Terrell, S., Neff, D., Allen, A., & Crowell, S. (2019). Intergenerational transmission of emotion dysregulation: Part I. Psychopathology, self-injury, and parasympathetic responsivity among pregnant women. Development and Psychopathology, 31(3), 817–831. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579419000336.
Little, R. J. (1988). A test of missing completely at random for multivariate data with missing values. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 83(404), 1198–1202. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1988.10478722.
Lovejoy, M. C., Graczyk, P. A., O’Hare, E., & Neuman, G. (2000). Maternal depression and parenting behavior: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 20(5), 561–592. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0272-7358(98)00100-7.
Marcal, K. E. (2021). Pathways to adolescent emotional and behavioral problems: An examination of maternal depression and harsh parenting. Child Abuse and Neglect, 113, 104917. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104917.
Morris, A. S., Criss, M. M., Silk, J. S., & Houltberg, B. J. (2017). The impact of parenting on emotion regulation during childhood and adolescence. Child Development Perspectives, 11(4), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12238.
Nickerson, A., Bryant, R. A., Aderka, I. M., Hinton, D. E., & Hofman, S. F. (2011). The impacts of parental loss and adverse parenting on mental health: Findings from the National Comorbidity Survey – Replication. Psychological Trauma: Theory Research Practice and Policy, 5, 119–127. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025695.
O’Connor, E. E., Langer, D. A., & Tompson, M. C. (2018). Maternal depression and youth internalizing and externalizing symptomatology: Severity and chronicity of past maternal depression and current maternal depressive symptoms. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 45, 557–568. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-016-0185-1.
O’Neal, C. R., & Magai, C. (2005). Do parents respond in different ways when children feel different emotions? The emotional context of parenting. Development and Psychopathology, 17, 467–487. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579405050224.
Preacher, K. J., & Hayes, A. F. (2008). Contemporary approaches to assessing mediation in communication research. In A. F. Hayes, M. D. Slater, & L. B. Snyder (Eds.), The Sage sourcebook of advanced data analysis methods for communication research, (pp. 13–54). Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452272054.n2.
Premo, J. E., & Kiel, E. J. (2016). Maternal depressive symptoms, toddler emotion regulation, and subsequent emotion socialization. Journal of Family Psychology, 30(2), 276–285. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000165.
Price, N. N., & Kiel, E. J. (2022). Longitudinal links among mother and child emotion regulation, maternal emotion socialization, and child anxiety. Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, 50(2), 241–254. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-021-00804-1.
Priel, A., Zeev-Wolf, M., Djalovski, A., & Feldman, R. (2020). Maternal depression impairs child emotion understanding and executive functions: The role of dysregulated maternal care across the first decade of life. Emotion, 20(6), 1042–1058. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000614.
Propper, C., & Moore, G. A. (2006). The influence of parenting on infant emotionality: A multi-level psychobiological perspective. Developmental Review, 26(4), 427–460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2006.06.003.
Radloff, L. S. (1977). The CES-D scale: A self-report depression scale for research in the general population. Applied Psychological Measurement, 1(3), 385–401. https://doi.org/10.1177/014662167700100306.
Shields, A., & Cicchetti, D. (1997). Emotion regulation among school-age children: The development and validation of a new criterion Q-sort scale. Developmental Psychology, 33(6), 906–916. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.33.6.906.
Silk, J. S., Shaw, D. S., Forbes, E. E., Lane, T. L., & Kovacs, M. (2006). Maternal depression and child internalizing: The moderating role of child emotion regulation. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 35(1), 116–126. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15374424jccp3501_10.
Silk, J. S., Shaw, D. S., Prout, J. T., O’Rourke, F., Lane, T. J., & Kovacs, M. (2011). Socialization of emotion and offspring internalizing symptoms in mothers with childhood-onset depression. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 32(3), 127–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2011.02.001.
Spinrad, T. L., Morris, A. S., & Luthar, S. S. (2020). Introduction to the special issue: Socialization of emotion and self-regulation: Understanding processes and application. Developmental Psychology, 56(3), 385–389. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000904.
Thomassin, K., Suveg, C., Davis, M., Lavner, J. A., & Beach, S. R. (2017). Coparental affect, children’s emotion dysregulation, and parent and child depressive symptoms. Family Process, 56(1), 126–140. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12184.
Thompson, R. A. (1994). Emotion regulation: A theme in search of definition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59(2/3), 25–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/1166137.
World Health Organization (2021, September 13). Depression: Key facts. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression
Wu, Q., Feng, X., Hooper, E., & Ku, S. (2017). Maternal emotion socialization, depressive symptoms and child emotion regulation: Child emotionality as a moderator. Infant and Child Development, 26(1), e1979. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.1979.
Zahn-Waxler, C., Klimes-Dougan, B., & Slattery, M. J. (2000). Internalizing problems of childhood and adolescence: Prospects, pitfalls, and progress in understanding the development of anxiety and depression. Development and Psychopathology, 12(3), 443–466. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579400003102.
Funding
This research was supported by Inha University (grant no. 68044).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethis approval
The authors’ institutional review board approved this study. The authors performed the research following the ethical standards in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.
Consent to participate
All participants provided informed consent to participate in the present study.
Consent for publication
All participants provided informed consent for the data to be published.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Choi, J.Y., Eoh, Y. & Kang, J.H. Emotion socialization mediates the short-term longitudinal relationship between mothers’ depressive symptoms and children’s emotion regulation. Curr Psychol 43, 3599–3606 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04528-x
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04528-x