How Maternal Depression and Children's Negative Emotions Impact Mothers' Physiological Regulation of Emotion
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Date
2023-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Much of the research investigating children's emotion regulation has focused on how parents regulate children's emotions, and far less on children's impact on parents' emotion regulation. The present study aims to fill the gaps in the literature by investigating how children's negative emotion affects their mothers' emotion regulation. To measure mothers' emotion regulation, this study focused on mothers' respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) as an index of physiological regulation of emotion. Specifically, this study aimed to examine whether during challenging dyadic interactions children's expression of negative emotion resulted in depressed mothers exhibiting a lower RSA reactivity (i.e., reduced temporal emotion regulation) compared to non-depressed mothers. Participants were 106 mother-child dyads; half of the mothers had a diagnosis of major depressive disorder (MDD) during their child's lifetime. The interaction effect between mother's current depressive symptoms and child's expression of negative emotion did not predict maternal RSA reactivity. Exploratory analyses revealed significant main effects with mothers' current depressive symptoms and significant interaction effects between mothers' current depressive symptoms and children's negative affect when predicting maternal baseline RSA. These results suggest that mothers who were less depressed and had more reactive children had greater emotion regulation capabilities. Further research should be conducted to examine if for mothers with depression, children's negative emotions can impact their emotion regulation capabilities.
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Keywords
emotion regulation, maternal depression, RSA, mother-child dyad