The Impact of Early Life Adversity and Parenting Skills on Emotion Regulation in a Child Welfare-Involved Sample

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorSkowron, Elizabeth
dc.contributor.authorRock, Alexus
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-07T22:47:50Z
dc.date.issued2024-08-07
dc.description.abstractChild 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.en_US
dc.description.embargo2025-07-23
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/29838
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregon
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.
dc.subjectchild emotion regulationen_US
dc.subjectchild welfareen_US
dc.subjectearly childhood adversityen_US
dc.subjectgo/no-go tasken_US
dc.subjectparentingen_US
dc.titleThe Impact of Early Life Adversity and Parenting Skills on Emotion Regulation in a Child Welfare-Involved Sample
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
thesis.degree.disciplineDepartment of Psychology
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregon
thesis.degree.levelmasters
thesis.degree.nameM.S.

Files

Collections

Theses and Dissertations
Psychology Theses and Dissertations