Emotion Regulation and Expression Among Parents of Children Residing in Emergency Housing

Abstract

Effective emotion socialization – including parental modeling of healthy emotional expression and adaptive regulation – may support resilience for children experiencing adversity. Unfortunately, parental modeling of emotion may be negatively altered in the context of stress. The current study examined associations among parents’ emotional experience, expression, and regulation in families with young children experiencing homelessness. Participants were 108 primary caregivers (89.8% female) of 4- to 6-year-old children (58.2% male) in emergency housing. Parents reported on their own recent emotional experiences, habitual emotion expressiveness in the family environment, and emotion regulation strategy use (e.g., rumination, positive reappraisal). Parents’ emotional expressions were also coded observationally from video-recorded parent-child interaction tasks. We hypothesized that parental emotional experience and regulation would each predict emotion expressions in the parent-child context, and that parental emotion regulation would moderate the links between the experience and expression of negative emotion. Hypotheses were partially supported. Self-reported subjective emotional experiences predicted self-reported but not observed emotion expressiveness, and associations linking regulation with emotional experience and expressiveness were largely valence-specific (i.e., adaptive regulation predicting positive emotions, maladaptive regulation predicting negative emotions). Adaptive (but not maladaptive) regulation uniquely predicted more positive emotion expressiveness (observed and self-reported) and less self-reported negative expressiveness. Sociodemographic risk was not related to parental emotion variables, and regulation did not moderate links between emotional experience and expression. Results suggest that adaptive regulatory strategies may help parents experience and express more positive and less negative emotions in the context of poverty and homelessness, with potential downstream benefits for children’s social-emotional development. This study assesses links among self-reported and observed emotion processes among parents of young children in emergency housing. Self-reported emotion experience predicted self-reported (but not observed) expressiveness in valence-specific ways. Self-reported emotion regulation strategy use was associated with multiple measures of emotion experience and expressiveness. Adaptive regulatory strategies predicted more positive and less negative expressiveness, controlling for emotion experience. Regulatory strategy use did not moderate links between emotion experience and expression.