Introduction to the Special Issue: Transdiagnostic Implications of Parental Socialization of Child and Adolescent Emotions

Abstract

Developmental research suggests that parent emotion socialization plays a critical role in children’s development of emotion-related skills and their risk for psychopathology. Adaptive emotion socialization practices can shape children’s capacities to understand and regulate their own emotions, and when maladaptive, these practices can confer risk for both internalizing and externalizing problems, suggesting transdiagnsotic significance. Yet, emerging work suggests that the effects of parent emotion socialization are not universal and may differ based on children’s unique vulnerabilities, highlighting the need to examine both parent and child factors within transactional models. Given the developmental shifts in emotion regulation capacities and autonomy across development, there is a great need for longitudinal emotion socialization research, as well as work that accounts for alternative interpretations, in this domain. Additionally, to-date much of the work in this regard has utilized parental report in isolation, making the need for cutting-edge, multi-method approaches highly salient. Further, translating scientific research into parent emotion socialization interventions is still in its infancy, with the majority of available treatments focusing on young children. As such, contributors to this special issue help address these gaps in the literature and examine the implications of a range of parent emotion socialization behaviors in the context of both adaptive and maladaptive child and adolescent emotional development. In this introduction, we highlight major themes of the special issue; further discussion and future directions are offered in the commentary accompanying this special issue.

Parent emotion socialization, the ways in which parents model, respond to, and coach children and adolescents during emotional experiences, can shape children’s capacities to understand and regulate their own emotions (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Parent emotion socialization includes a range of parenting behaviors, including a parent’s own emotional expression and emotion regulation strategies, parent’s responses to the child’s emotional displays, and parent’s coaching and discussion of emotions with their child (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Morris et al., 2017). Since 1998 when the groundbreaking article on parent emotion socialization (Eisenberg et al., 1998) was published, hundreds of articles have examined the critical role of these parenting behaviors and practices in supporting children’s development of emotion-related skills. In addition, growing work suggests that when such parenting behaviors are maladaptive, they can confer risk for both internalizing and externalizing problems (Buckholdt et al., 2014), suggesting transdiagnostic significance.

Building on a large base of developmental research, this special issue focuses on the transdiagnostic significance of parent emotion socialization for child and adolescent psychopathology symptoms and diagnoses. The special issue sought to fill several critical gaps in the literature. First, the majority of emotion socialization research to date has focused on community or typically developing samples (see Spinrad et al., 2020 for a recent special issue in Developmental Psychology including 20 such articles), limiting our understanding of the specific ways in which parent emotion socialization may influence child and adolescent psychopathology. In addition, existing literature on this topic has often been cross-sectional, despite important developmental shifts in emotion regulation capacities and risk for psychopathology that span early childhood through adolescence. Further, few studies have translated scientific research on emotion socialization into interventions, particularly for clinical populations of children (see England-Mason & Gonzalez, 2020 for a review). And finally, clinical research on emotion socialization has often utilized child- or parent-report questionnaires to assess parent emotion socialization practices (e.g., Coping with Children’s Negative Emotion Scale; Fabes et al., 1990, Emotions as a Child scale; Magai, 1996) and youth emotional outcomes (e.g., Emotion Regulation Checklist; Shields & Cicchetti, 1997, Difficulties with Emotion Regulation Scale, Neumann et al., 2010). These measures may fail to fully capture the multi-faceted aspects of parenting and youth emotional experiences. Thus, in this special issue we focus on the transdiagnostic role of parent emotion socialization, including research with clinical populations, research examining the role of emotion socialization in the development of psychopathology, and intervention research. We have a particular interest in studies that are longitudinal and that utilize cutting-edge methodologies, and/or multi-method assessments of parent emotion socialization and/or youth emotional functioning. Table 1 includes a summary of the 23 articles in this special issue (listed in alphabetical order by first author last name), including the sample size, age range of the children in the sample, the population characteristics, study methodology, and measures used.

Table 1.

Articles included in this special issue (N = 23)

Article	Sample size	Age range	Population	Methodology	Measurement of ES	Moderators/mediators	Child outcome(s)
Berla et al. (2021)	46	11–17 years	83% with a mood disorder 63% female Child: 26% Asian, 7% Latinx, 13% multiracial/other, 54% White	Cross-sectional Standardized Task	Expressed Emotion and Criticism During Five-Minute Speech Sample (clinician-rated) and Levels of Expressed Emotion Scale (parent-rated)	Child Emotion Regulation (child-reported DERS; mediator)	Depression symptoms (clinical interview with child and parent)
Breaux et al. (2021)	18	11–16 years	100% with ADHD 30% female Child: 55.6% Black, 11.1% Latinx, 5.6% multiracial, 38.9% White	Cross-sectional Standardized Task Psychophysiology (RSA)	Supportive and Non-Supportive Parenting During Conflict Discussion Task (coded)	N/A	Emotion regulation (coded, RSA) Negative Affect (coded, child-report)
Byrd et al. (2021)	162	10–14 years	Clinically Referred Sample 47% female Child: 0.6% American Indian/Alaskan Native, 40.7% Black, 3.7% Hispanic/Latino, 16.7% multiracial, 42% White	Longitudinal (9 months) EMA	Supportive and Non-Supportive Parenting using ESM (child report), EMA (child and parent report), and Conflict Discussion Task (clinician coded)	Child Negative Emotionality (child-reported EMA; mediator)	Reactive aggression (child-reported EMA)
Cohodes et al. (2021)	407	0–17 years	Community Sample 52.8% female Parent: 9.8% Asian, 8.1% Black, 5.9% Latinx, 2.0% Native American, 72.2% Non-Hispanic White, 1.7% other	Cross-sectional Measure Development	Parental assistance in regulation of child emotions (parent-report)	N/A	Internalizing and externalizing problems (parent-report)
Cosgrove et al. (2020)	33	14–16 years	Community Sample 55.9% female Child: 10.2% Black,, 8.5% Multiple Races, 81.4% White	Cross-sectional fMRI during Standardized Tasks	EAC (child-report) Parent Negative Verbalizations during Conflict Discussion Task (coded)	N/A	Neural emotion processing (fMRI)
Dunbar et al. (2021)	94	5 years (T1), 6 years (T2)	Community Sample 56% female Child:100% Black or multiracial including Black	Longitudinal (1 year) Psychophysiology (RSA)	CCNES (parent-report)	Child preparation for racial bias and baseline RSA (moderators)	Internalizing and externalizing problems (parent-report)
Fredrick and Luebbe (2021)	107	11–14 years	Community Sample 45.8% female Child: 1.9% Asian, 3.7% Black, 12.1% Mixed Race, 82.2% White	Cross-sectional Standardized Task	RAHAS and PBI (parent and child report) MPES (child-report)	Child temperamental shyness and gender (moderators)	Fears of Social Evaluation (negative and positive evaluation; child-report)
Johnco et al. (2021)	139	6–18 years	100% with an anxiety disorder Child: 18.0% Hispanic, 86.3% White	Cross-sectional	PBA-Q (parent-report)	Parental Accommodation (parent-report; mediator)	Pediatric Anxiety Rating Scale (clinician-report)
Jordan et al. (2021)	88	8–15 years	72.7% diagnosed with ASD and co-occurring anxiety disorders 28.4% female Child: 5.7% Asian, 6.8% Black, 20.5% Latinx, 10.2% multracial, 77.3% White	Cross-sectional	CCNES (parent-report)	N/A	Multidimensional Anxiety Rating Scale (parent and child report)
McKee et al. (2021)	229	3–12 years	Community Sample 51% female Child: 3.1% Asian, 7% Black, 5.7% Latinx, 83.8% White	Longitudinal (4 months)	CCNES, DERS, and MAAS (parent-report)	Child age (moderator)	Emotion regulation (ERC) and Internalizing and externalizing problems (parent-report)
McKone et al. (2021)	97	11–13 years	Community Sample 100% female Child: 69% White	Cross-sectional Psychophysiology (SCL) Standardized Task	SCL during Conflict Discussion Task (mutual arousal between mother–daughter)	N/A	Emotion regulation (physiological habituation to Speech Task, child-reported rumination and problem-solving)
McQuade et al. (2021)	61	9–13 years (T1), 14–18 years (T2)	49.2% with full or sub-threshold ADHD 52% female Child: 5% Asian American, 8% Latinx, 7% mixed race, 88% White	Longitudinal (4–5 years) Psychophysiology (SCL) Standardized Task	CCNES (parent-report)	SCL (moderator)	BPD symptoms (child and parent report)
Moffitt et al. (2021)	77	6–10 years	100% with ASD 16.8% female Child: 5% Asian, 5% Black, 47% Latinx, 8% multi-racial, 3% other, 33% White	Cross-sectional Psychophysiology (RSA, EDA-R) Standardized Task	CCNES (parent-report) Parental Scaffolding during Dyadic Problem-Solving Task (coded)	N/A	RSA, EDA-R
Oddo et al. (2020)	247	13 years (T1), 14 years (T2), 15 years (T3)	Community Sample 43.7% female Child: 1.6% Asian, 37.7% Black, 8.2% other, 52.5% White	Longitudinal (2 years)	DERS (parent-report)	CCNES (parent-report; mediator) Child ADHD symptoms (parent-report; moderator)	Emotional lability (ERC; parent-report)
Otterpohl et al. (2021)	634	10–14 years; Grade 6 (T1), Grade 7 (T2), Grade 9 (T3)	Community Sample 49.4% female Child: predominantly Caucasian with German nationality	Longitudinal (3 years) Cross-lag Model	EAC (parent-report)	N/A	Internalizing and externalizing problems (parent and child-report) Dysfunctional Anger Regulation (parent-report)
Price and Kiel (2021)	175	2 years (T1), 3 years (T2), 4 years (T3)	Community Sample 42.9% female Child: 1.1% Asian or Pacific Islander, 1.7% Black, 1.1% Latinx, 9.1% multi-racial, 80% White	Longitudinal (2 years) Standardized Task	DERS and CTNES (parent-report)	CTNES (parent-report, mediator) Caregiver-focused emotion regulation (coded, mediator)	Anxiety symptoms (parent-report)
Rapp et al. (2021)	90	13–17 years	Community Sample 42.2% female Child: 24.1% Asian, 38.6% Latinx, 37.3% White	Cross-sectional EEG during Standardized Task	ESM (parent-report)	Child collectivism (moderator)	Feedback-related negativity during Island Getaway paradigm
Smit et al. (2021)	172	6–11 years	100% with ADHD 30% female Child: 5.8% Asian, 0.5% Black, 1.2% Latinx, 18.6% multi-racial, 72.7% White	Intervention (pre-treatment, post-treatment, 8 months follow-up) Cross-lagged Model	Parent emotion strategies, warmth, praise, and criticism during child coaching before and after child-friend interaction (coded)	N/A	Positive affect (coded) Withdrawn/depressed and aggressive behaviors (parent and teacher-report)
Trent et al. (2021)	105	8–12 years	100% Clinically Anxious Sample 57.1% female Child: 1.9% Asian, 14.3% Black, 28.6% Hispanic, 17.1% multiracial, 38.1% non-Hispanic White	Cross-sectional Standardized Task	CCNES (parent-report)	Child fearful temperament (child-report; moderator)	Social anxiety symptoms (child-report and coded during speech performance task)
Valentino et al. (2021)	242	3–6 years	66% Maltreating Families 49.2% female Child: 40.5% Black, 19.0% Latinx/Other, 40.5% White	Intervention (baseline, 8 weeks follow-up, 6 months follow-up, 1 year follow-up) Standardized Task	Maternal Sensitive Guidance during Emotion Discussion Task (coded)	Maternal Sensitive Guidance during Emotion Discussion Task (coded; mediator)a	Maladjustment rated via Total Difficulties score on SDQ (parent-report)
Wade et al. (2021)	501	0–2 months (T1), 18 months (T2), 36 months (T3)	Community Sample Maternal parent: 26.6% Asian. 9.2% Black, 7.7% other, 56.5% White	Longitudinal (3 years) Standardized Task	Maternal responsiveness and Negative affect/Negative Control (coded)	Maternal responsiveness and Negative affect/Negative (mediators)b	Internalizing and externalizing problems (parent-report)
Watson et al. (2021)	116	9–15 years	50% of mothers had ≥ 1 MDD episode during child’s lifetime 44% female children Child: 3% Asian, 25% Black, 5% Latinx, 67% White	Cross-sectional Standardized Task	Coping Socialization During Discussion	Maternal Depression and Child Peer Stress	Internalizing symptoms (child and parent report)
White et al. (2021)	90	12–17 years	73.3% of sample met criteria for ≥ 1 mental health diagnoses (61.8% with a depressive disorder, 50.6% with an anxiety disorder, 20.2% with a trauma and stressor-related disorder) 100% female Child: 3.3% Asian, 7.8% Black, 10.0% Latinx, 3.3% Native American, 75.6% White	Cross-sectional	EAC (parent-report)	N/A	Non-suicidal self-injury (child report via structured interview)

DERS Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, ADHD attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, RSA respiratory sinus arrhythmia, EMA ecological momentary assessment, ESM Emotion Socialization Measure, fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging, EAC Emotions as a Child, CCNES Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale, RAHAS Response to Adolescents’ Happy Affect Scale, PBI Parental Bonding Instrument, MPES Messages about Positive Evaluation Scale, PBA-Q Parental Beliefs About Anxiety Questionnaire, ASD autism spectrum disorder, MAAS Mindfulness Attention and Awareness Scale, ERC Emotion Regulation Checklist, SCL skin conductance level, BPD borderline personality disorder, EDA-R electrodermal reactivity, CTNES Coping with Toddlers’ Negative Emotions Scale, EEG electroencephalogram, SDQ Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, MDD major depressive disorder, T1 time point 1, T2 time point 2, T3 time point 3

^aThe independent variables in this study were maltreatment, Reminiscing and Emotion Training, and maternal depressive symptoms, the emotion socialization variable was the mediator in analyses

^bMaternal responsiveness and Negative affect/Negative were also explored as mediators of the relations between family income and maternal education on child outcomes

Impressively, participants in the included studies ranged from neonates (i.e., Wade et al., 2021) through adolescents aged 18 years (i.e., McQuade et al., 2021), underscoring the importance of parent emotion socialization across child development. With regard to race/ethnicity, six of the studies had predominately non-White samples (Breaux et al., 2021; Byrd et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021; Rapp et al., 2021; Trent et al., 2021; Valentino et al., 2021), and one study focused on socialization of Black children specifically (Dunbar et al., 2021). Three of the studies were conducted outside of the United States—the Otterpohl et al. (2021) study was conducted in Germany and the Smit et al. (2021) and Wade et al. (2021) studies were conducted in Canada. One study (Rapp et al., 2021) examined how collectivism influenced the effects of parent emotion socialization in a sample that included Latinx, Asian, and White children. This inclusion of families from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and different countries is critical given the role of culture in parent emotion socialization and the predominance of the literature on White families, particularly from the United States (see Eisenberg, 2020; Friedlmeier et al., 2011).

While examining the articles included in this special issue, several major themes emerged: (1) the importance of examining the associations between emotion socialization and youth emotional functioning within clinical samples, (2) the continued need for longitudinal emotion socialization research and intervention work, (3) the importance of examining factors that may shape the influence of parent emotion socialization on child emotional functioning, and (4) the use of cutting-edge methodologies and multi-method approaches to measure parent emotion socialization and youth emotional functioning. In this introduction, we briefly discuss these four themes and the specific articles that informed these themes.

Theme 1: Importance of Examining Parent Emotion Socialization Within Clinical Samples

In this special issue, just over half of the articles (n = 12) utilized a clinical sample (Berla et al., 2021; Breaux et al., 2021; Byrd et al., 2021; Johnco et al., 2021; Jordan et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021; Smit et al., 2021; Trent et al., 2021; Valentino et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2021; White et al., 2021). Of the remaining 11 articles, six examined child psychopathology symptoms as an outcome (Cohodes et al., 2021; Dunbar et al., 2021; McKee et al., 2021; Otterpohl et al., 2021; Price & Kiel, 2021; Wade et al., 2021), and one examined child psychopathology symptoms as a moderator of the link between parent emotion socialization and child emotional lability (Oddo et al., 2020). Of the 12 articles utilizing a clinical sample, three were attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) samples (Breaux et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Smit et al., 2021), two were autism spectrum disorder (ASD) samples (one of which also required co-occurring anxiety disorders; Jordan et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021), two were anxiety disorder samples (Johnco et al., 2021; Trent et al., 2021), two were depressive disorder samples (one focused on child depression, one focused on maternal depression; Berla et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2021), one was a maltreatment sample (Valentino et al., 2021), one was a broad clinically referred sample (Byrd et al., 2021), and one was a mixed clinical sample experiencing a range of non-suicidal self-injury (White et al., 2021). As such, this special issue underscores the transdiagnostic significance of parent emotion socialization. The special issue also represents an important step towards increasing the limited parent emotion socialization literature among clinical populations. For instance, prior to this special issue, there was only one published study (to our knowledge) examining parent emotion socialization and children’s emotional functioning in an ADHD sample and two in an ASD sample.

Measures of parent emotion socialization varied widely across studies, and included parent expressed emotion (Berla et al., 2021), coping socialization (Watson et al., 2021), negative beliefs about anxiety (Johnco et al., 2021), sensitive guidance during an emotion discussion (Valentino et al., 2021), supportive responses to youth emotional displays (e.g., validation, comfort, facilitation of problem-solving; Breaux et al., 2021; Byrd et al., 2021; Jordan et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021; White et al., 2021), and non-supportive responses to youth emotional displays (e.g., discouraging, dismissing, magnifying; Breaux et al., 2021; Byrd et al., 2021; Jordan et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021; Trent et al., 2021). Collectively, studies suggested that parent emotion socialization practices are linked to youth emotionality (Breaux et al., 2021), emotion regulation (Berla et al., 2021; Breaux et al., 2021; Byrd et al., 2021), physiological reactivity (Breaux et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021) internalizing symptoms (Berla et al., 2021; Johnco et al., 2021; Jordan et al., 2021; Trent et al., 2021), externalizing symptoms (Byrd et al., 2021), borderline personality disorder (BPD) features (McQuade et al., 2021), non-suicidal self-injury (White et al., 2021), and overall maladjustment (Valentino et al., 2021).

Surprisingly, only one study in the special issue examined differences in parent emotion socialization practices among parents of children with a clinical disorder versus parents of typically developing children (Jordan et al., 2021). Results suggest that parents of children with clinical disorders did not differ from parents of typically developing children in their endorsement of various emotion socialization practices. However, there was some evidence across studies that within clinical samples, individual child factors did predict emotion socialization practices. Specifically, Jordan et al. (2021) found that among children with ASD and comorbid anxiety, greater anxiety symptoms were associated with more emotion-focused responses and lower levels of anxiety were associated with more punitive responses. Additionally, Oddo et al. (2020) found that in a community sample, parent emotion socialization was more strongly linked to adolescent emotional lability for youth with higher levels of ADHD symptom severity. Thus, although this special issue provides a large step in increasing the emotion socialization literature via the inclusion of clinical samples, an important area for future research will be to examine if the role of parent emotion socialization differs among youth with and without clinical disorders as is suggested by some prior research (e.g., Breaux et al., 2018; Suveg et al., 2005) and research in this special issue (Oddo et al., 2020).

Theme 2: Need for Longitudinal and Intervention Work

Eight of the included studies were longitudinal, spanning 4 months up to 4–5 years of longitudinal measurement (Byrd et al., 2021; Dunbar et al., 2021; McKee et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Oddo et al., 2020; Otterpohl et al., 2021; Price & Kiel, 2021; Wade et al., 2021) and two were intervention studies (Smit et al., 2021; Valentino et al., 2021). In addition, several of the studies included in the current review involved data from baseline assessment visits for longitudinal or intervention research studies (e.g., Breaux et al., 2021; White et al., 2021), suggesting that further longitudinal and intervention emotion socialization work will be forthcoming in the near future.

Four of the longitudinal studies included measures of youth emotional functioning at multiple time points, allowing researchers to account for changes over time (Byrd et al., 2021; Dunbar et al., 2021; McKee et al., 2021; Otterpohl et al., 2021). One of these studies (Byrd et al., 2021) utilized ecological momentary assessment with measures of parent emotion socialization, adolescent negative emotionality, and adolescent aggression being collected each day of a 4-day protocol that was repeated 9 months later). This design is uniquely suited to examine both concurrent and longitudinal associations between parent emotion socialization and youth emotional functioning. A similarly strong analytic approach was offered by Otterpohl et al. (2021) who utilized cross-lag models to examine bidirectional relations between parent emotion socialization, youth emotion regulation, and youth psychopathology symptoms across time. Two studies (Dunbar et al., 2021; McKee et al., 2021) examined whether parent emotion socialization predicted youth emotion regulation and/or psychopathology symptoms at a later time point (1 year and 4 months, respectively), controlling for earlier child functioning. The remaining four longitudinal studies (McQuade et al., 2021; Oddo et al., 2020; Price & Kiel, 2021; Wade et al., 2021) examined how early parent emotion socialization predicted later youth emotional functioning, but did not have measures of earlier youth emotional functioning as control variables, providing more limited conclusions about the directionality of effects.

Of the two intervention studies, one was with preschool-aged youth (Valentino et al., 2021) and the other was with elementary-school-aged youth (Smit et al., 2021). Valentino et al. (2021) utilized Reminiscing and Emotion Training, a relational intervention designed to improve maternal emotion socialization by enhancing maltreating mothers’ sensitive guidance during reminiscing with their preschoolers. They found a significant increase in maternal sensitive guidance and a significant decrease in child maladjustment from baseline to the 1 year follow-up. Smit et al. (2021) examined the Parental Friendship Coaching intervention, which teaches parents to coach their children with ADHD in interpersonal skills, including emotion regulation skills, and sought to assess whether this intervention resulted in improved parent emotion socialization behaviors and child social-emotional outcomes, relative to psychoeducation and social support. This study found that the Parental Friendship Coaching intervention resulted in increases in parental warmth and praise, and decreases in youth withdrawn/depressed behavior relative to the control treatment (Smit et al., 2021). Together these two studies from this special issue add to prior emotion socialization intervention research (e.g. Chronis-Tuscano et al., 2016; Herbert et al., 2013), and suggest that parent emotion socialization is an important treatment target for clinical populations of children. Given the important links found between parent emotion socialization and a broad range of youth outcomes in this special issue, it is also clear that additional emotion socialization intervention research is needed. Intervention research in clinical populations and in the adolescent developmental period are especially needed, given that the majority of prior emotion socialization intervention research has focused on typically developing (e.g., Havighurst et al., 2010; Kehoe et al., 2014), externalizing (e.g., Havighurst et al., 2013; Herbert et al., 2013), and preschool (see England-Mason & Gonzalez, 2020) populations.

Theme 3: Importance of Factors Shaping the Influence of Parent Emotion Socialization on Youth Emotional Functioning

Several of the studies in the current special issue add to the limited prior research (e.g., Hastings et al., 2014; McQuade & Breaux, 2017; Stanger et al., 2018) suggesting that the link between parent emotion socialization and youth social-emotional outcomes depends on individual difference factors. Specifically, eight articles in this special issue examined moderators of the relation between parent emotion socialization and youth emotional functioning. All eight of these studies examined child factors (i.e., child age, gender, physiological reactivity, peer status, temperament, collectivism, symptomatology) as moderators (Dunbar et al., 2021; Fredrick & Luebbe, 2021; McKee et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Oddo et al., 2020; Rapp et al., 2021; Trent et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2021), and two also examined parent factors (i.e., depression and preparation for racial bias [i.e., parent messages warning Black children that they may experience unfair treatment due to their race and ways to cope]) as moderators (Dunbar et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2021). Several studies (Dunbar et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2021) found that parent emotion socialization practices were not directly linked to youth emotional outcomes, but were linked with youth psychopathology (i.e., internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, and BPD features) only in the context of specific vulnerabilities (i.e., peer stress, physiological reactivity, and preparation for racial bias).

Interestingly, several studies found results that seem contradictory to theory suggesting that supportive reactions should promote more positive social-emotional outcomes and non-supportive reactions should promote more negative social-emotional outcomes (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Morris et al., 2017). For example, McQuade et al. (2021) found that in a sample of youth with and without ADHD, greater skin conductance level reactivity to social stress was actually associated with greater elevations in adolescent BPD features, specifically when parents were high in supportive reactions or low in non-supportive reactions. A similar interactional pattern was found by Fredrick and Luebbe (2021) in an early adolescent community sample, such that maternal warmth was related to greater fears of negative evaluation for youth with low levels of shyness, but related to lower fears of negative evaluation for youth with high levels of shyness. Similarly, Trent et al. (2021) found that in a clinically anxious sample of children, more punitive maternal responses to negative emotions was associated with less social anxiety specifically for those with a fearful temperament. Finally, Dunbar et al. (2021) found that in a community sample of 5–6-year-old Black children, greater parent suppression of emotions (i.e., non-supportive reactions) was associated with decreases in externalizing problems for children whose parents discussed racism with them, but predicted increases for children with high baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia, whose parents did not discuss racism with them. Collectively, these findings are consistent with more recent research that has challenged the field’s assumptions that supportive parent reactions are universally positive and non-supportive reactions are universally negative (e.g., Mirabile et al., 2018). Findings from the articles included in the current special issue continue to support this notion and highlight the importance of taking a more nuanced approach to examining the relation between parent emotion socialization and youth social-emotional functioning.

In addition to these articles examining moderators of the relation between parent emotion socialization and youth emotional functioning, four articles in this special issue examined mediational relations between parent emotion socialization and youth emotional functioning (Berla et al., 2021; Byrd et al., 2021; Johnco et al., 2021; Price & Kiel, 2021). Three of these studies examined youth emotion regulation as a mediator, and their findings suggest that youth emotion regulation abilities at least partially mediate the relation between parent emotion socialization and youth depression, anxiety, and aggression (Berla et al., 2021; Byrd et al., 2021; Price & Kiel, 2021). Johnco and colleagues examined parent accommodation as a mediator and found that parent negative beliefs about anxiety were related to increased parental accommodation, which in turn was associated with increased child anxiety. Additionally, three articles (Oddo et al., 2020; Price & Kiel, 2021; Wade et al., 2021) examined parent emotion socialization practices as the mediator in the associations between other parent variables (i.e., emotion regulation, family income, maternal education) and youth adjustment and psychopathology. Of these, two found that parent emotion socialization practices mediate the relation between parent emotion regulation and youth emotional outcomes (Oddo et al., 2020; Price & Kiel, 2021). The third found parent emotion socialization practices (i.e., maternal responsiveness and reflective capacity) mediated that effects of family income and maternal education on youth internalizing and externalizing symptoms (Wade et al., 2021). Finally, Valentino et al. (2021) examined whether intervention-related improvement in emotion socialization practices mediated change in children’s maladjustment. This study found that Reminiscing and Emotion Training-related improvement in maternal sensitive guidance mediated the effects of Reminiscing and Emotion Training on reduced child maladjustment one year later; in contrast, poor sensitive guidance mediated the effects of maltreatment on higher child maladjustment among families that did not receive Reminiscing and Emotion Training (Valentino et al., 2021).

Theme 4: Importance of Novel Methodologies to Assess Parent Emotion Socialization and Youth Emotional Functioning

One of the goals of this special issue was to highlight cutting-edge and multi-method approaches that go beyond the sole use of child- and/or parent report, to assess parent emotion socialization and/or child emotional functioning. Impressively, 14 articles in this special issue utilized standardized behavioral tasks (e.g., Conflict Discussion Task, Five-Minute Speech Sample, parent–child play interactions) to measure parent emotion socialization and/or youth emotional functioning (Berla et al., 2021; Breaux et al., 2021; Cosgrove et al., 2020; Fredrick and Luebbe, 2021; McKone et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021; Price & Kiel, 2021; Rapp et al., 2021; Smit et al., 2021; Trent et al., 2021; Valentino et al., 2021; Wade et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2021). Most of these studies utilized these tasks to assess parent emotion socialization practices (n = 11), but six also measured youth emotional functioning with a mix of behavioral coding (Breaux et al., 2021; Price & Kiel, 2021; Smit et al., 2021) and neurological/psychophysiological (Breaux et al., 2021; Cosgrove et al., 2020; McKone et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021; Rapp et al., 2021) measures. One study also utilized ecological momentary assessment (Byrd et al., 2021), an increasingly accessible approach to assess real-time behavioral functioning to measure parent emotion socialization, child emotionality, and child aggression in daily life. These methodologies have clear benefits over informant-report measures. Specifically, observations of parent emotion socialization and youth emotionality during standardized behavioral tasks can provide insight into how youth respond in various frustrating or stressful situations without biases in informant report (e.g., social desirability, retrospective memory). The advantages of using ecological momentary assessment is that it reduces retrospective memory biases and facilitates data collection in a real-world setting that cannot be created in a laboratory environment (McHale et al., 2014).

A range of psychophysiological and neural measures were included in this special issue—youth neural measures such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (Cosgrove et al., 2020) and electroencephalogram (Rapp et al., 2021), youth psychophysiological measures such as respiratory sinus arrhythmia and electrodermal reactivity (Breaux et al., 2021; Dunbar et al., 2021; McQuade et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021), and concordance in arousal between parent and adolescent physiological reactivity (McKone et al., 2021). Collectively, results from this special issue suggest that observed, physiological, and informant-reported parent emotion socialization practices (parent emotion regulation, reactivity, expressed emotion, and responses to youth emotionality) are linked to observed, physiological, and informant-reported youth emotional functioning. Importantly, some studies (e.g., Breaux et al., 2021) found similar findings across measurement methods (i.e., physiological and non-physiological indicators of emotional functioning), whereas others (e.g., McQuade et al., 2021; Moffitt et al., 2021) found differential effects across multiple physiological indicators. It will be important for future research to continue to implement multi-method approaches and try to understand where, and why, differences and effects may emerge.

One study in this special issue (Cohodes et al., 2021) also developed the novel Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) rating scale, which assesses the degree to which parents assist youth in utilizing emotion regulation strategies. The measure was designed to be used with youth from birth to 18-years, allowing researchers to examine developmental shifts in the effects of parent emotion socialization within longitudinal studies. Specific subscales of the PACER were linked to youth internalizing and externalizing problems, suggesting the measure may enable researchers to pinpoint specific parenting differences in emotion regulation support that are linked to youth psychopathology across development.

Conclusion

This special issue brought together novel and sophisticated methodologies to assess the transdiagnostic significance of parent emotion socialization for youth across childhood and adolescence (ages 0–18 years). Importantly, it significantly advanced the limited research on parent emotion socialization with clinical populations, and added to the growing longitudinal and intervention emotion socialization research body. Additionally, studies utilized numerous methodologies previously under-utilized in the emotion socialization literature, including ecological momentary assessment, neural functioning, psychophysiological reactivity, and behavioral observations during standardized tasks. Collectively, results underscore the importance for clinicians and researchers to continue examining emotion socialization practices as important intervention targets to improve children’s emotional functioning across the lifespan.