Sociocultural Contexts of Emotion Socialization in BIPOC Families
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Date
2024-01-09
Authors
Lee, Angela
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Having effective emotion regulation skills is critical to socioemotional well-being, and parents play a key role in the development of children’s emotion regulation through emotion socialization behaviors. However, since emotion socialization research has been primarily conducted with majority culture families, extant studies have often lacked consideration of BIPOC families’ unique sociocultural contexts. The current dissertation aimed to expand our understanding of parent emotion socialization behaviors and their impact on child functioning among minoritized families through two studies. The first was a scoping review of how a predominant parent-report emotion socialization measure, the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES), has been utilized among ethnoracial minority families in the United States. Findings are discussed in relation to adaptation and psychometric validation of the CCNES. Results suggested that parent emotion socialization behaviors traditionally categorized as “supportive” or “nonsupportive” may be differentially associated with child outcomes among BIPOC families. Recommendations for best practices for using the CCNES are provided. The second study was an empirical evaluation of the association between maternal emotion socialization and child emotion regulation, testing the moderating role of racial identity among African American and White American families. Results showed that for Black/African American families, increased maternal emotion/problem-focused emotion socialization behaviors were associated with children's increased knowledge of sadness emotion regulation strategies, but this association was not significant among White families. Additionally, we conducted a preliminary examination of the role of culturally specific moderators with a subsample of Black/African American participants. Results suggested that associations between parent emotion socialization and child behavior problems were dependent on maternal racial socialization behaviors. Together, these results emphasize the importance of examining proximal factors of emotion socialization and considering normative developmental processes for minoritized youth that overlap with emotion regulation development.
Future researchers should test the unique and additive role of various emotion socialization behaviors, consider employing mixed-methods approaches to facilitate understanding of culturally nuanced emotion socialization responses, and examine culturally specific mechanisms. By incorporating these factors, researchers will be able to go beyond cross-cultural comparisons toward a conceptualization of child emotional development that integrates the dynamic interactions between emotion socialization and sociocultural context.
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Keywords
Developmental Psychopathology, Emotion Regulation, Emotion Socialization, Sociocultural Context