The Impact of Early Life Adversity and Parenting Skills on Emotion Regulation in a Child Welfare-Involved Sample
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Date
2024-08-07
Authors
Rock, Alexus
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Child Welfare (CW) involved children are vulnerable to developmental problems, including deficits in emotion regulation. Emotion regulation is crucial for understanding and responding to situations appropriately. The capacity of emotion regulation skills is sensitive and can be affected by early life adversity, family climate, and quality of parenting. This study investigates the emotion regulation skills of 189 CW-involved children and their associations with observed parenting behaviors and early life adversity. Children aged 3-7 (M = 4.86 years) completed an Emotional Go/No-Go Task to assess emotion regulation abilities and a series of DPICS-IV coded interaction tasks with their caregiver. CW-involved parents showed low rates of positive parenting skills (M = 2.5) and 9x higher rates of negative parenting skills (M = 23.6). Additionally, there was a significant amount of controlling parenting behavior, with almost half of the verbalizations children received being commands that were impossible to comply with. These controlling parenting behaviors were associated with higher false alarm rates and quicker reaction times. Exposure to early life adversity was unrelated to performance on the Emotional Go/No-Go Task. As predicted, older children showed faster, more accurate responses and fewer mistakes in correctly identifying facial emotions. Gender differences also emerged, with girls resisting error more efficiently than boys to both happy and angry distractor emotions and boys being quicker in accurately identifying angry faces in the presence of happy and neutral distractor emotions. These findings provide new insights into CW children’s emotion regulation, aiding clinicians in understanding the challenges CW-involved children and caregivers face.
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Keywords
child emotion regulation, child welfare, early childhood adversity, go/no-go task, parenting