Previous studies have shown that a child’s attachment relationship with the mother and the mother’s psychosocial functioning are influential to the child’s psychosocial functioning in terms of the development of psychopathology. The current study aimed to examine the relationships between maternal and child psychosocial functioning in terms of internalizing and externalizing symptoms and sleep problems, as well as child attachment quality. The potential mediating or moderating role of attachment quality in the mother-child psychosocial functioning linkage was investigated. A total of 151 children and their mothers from a local community sample participated in the study. The children reported on their sleep problems and attachment quality. The mothers reported on their sleep problems, their children’s sleep problems, their internalizing symptoms, and their children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Results showed that maternal internalizing symptoms were predictive of child internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Attachment quality was predictive of child externalizing symptoms. The relationships among maternal and child sleep problems and attachment quality were inconclusive. No mediation or moderation effect of attachment quality on the relationship between maternal and child psychosocial functioning was suggested. Implications and future research directions were discussed. / published_or_final_version / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

The construct of parental control and its role in influencing children’s motivation in collectivistic cultures have been hotly debated. Two studies examined Hong Kong Chinese children’s perception of parental control and its relation with their academic motivation with sociocultural considerations. In Study 1, children (n = 24) were invited to participate in a focus group to report what parental control meant to them. The qualitative data obtained in the discussion were then used to construct questionnaires for investigating the perception of children from different income groups towards low and high level of parental controlling behaviors in Study 2. Children (N = 294) from lower and higher income groups were randomly assigned to complete the questionnaires consisting of either low or high control scenarios. Results indicated that children from different income families viewed parental control similarly. Mild forms of controlling behaviors were considered as signs of love and care, while intense forms were perceived as signs of control. Interaction effects were found for children’s perceived level of love and control towards the behaviors depicted in the scenarios and their mothers’ frequency of performing those behaviors in real life on their academic motivation. The present research provided a clearer conceptualization of the construct of parental control in Chinese societies and supported the applicability of the self-determination theory in the Hong Kong context. / published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

At Time 2, the mother-adolescent dyads were contacted again at the end of the academic year, of which 304 dyads participated in the survey. The longitudinal model generated results similar to that of Time 1. Path analysis revealed that gender differences emerged in the complexity of the model. For girls, all stressors except emotional autonomy contributed to parenting stress, which in turn negatively influenced parenting style. Maternal control mediated the negative impact of parenting stress on achievement aspirations. However, parenting style did not predict girls' perceived academic competence. For boys, all stressors except emotional autonomy predicted parenting stress, which in turn impaired the quality of parenting style. However, parenting style did not predict any of boys' adjustment outcomes. Instead, emotional autonomy had a direct negative impact on achievement aspirations and perceived academic competence. / Based on results derived at Time 2, the model was revised and gender differences were tested using multi-sample analyses. In the final model, parenting stress had an indirect effect on girls' achievement aspirations through the mediation of parental control, whereas parenting stress had a direct effect on boys' achievement aspirations. However, only maternal academic distress predicted adolescent perceived academic competence in both genders. / The present dissertation broadened current literature in the area by proposing an integrated model of parenting stress. Findings suggested intervention to target at mother's parenting self-efficacy, and parenting alliance to ameliorate the stresses and burden of child caring. However, the validity of the findings may be impeded by limitations in relation to methodology. Implications for future research on parenting stress were discussed in detail. / There is no doubt that parenting is one of the most taxing roles. The issue of parenting stress is a complex phenomenon that requires research to be guided by theory and models (Abidin, 1990), without which advancement in the area would not be possible. The present dissertation was an attempt to propose an integrated model of parenting stress among Chinese mothers with children advancing from primary to secondary school. The integrated model was a modification of Abidin's (1992) model in that variables appropriate to the child's developmental stage and the Chinese culture were incorporated. The model postulated that parenting-relevant stressors/resources were predictive of parenting stress. Parenting stress then had a negative impact on adolescent outcomes through the mediation of parenting style. Negative outcomes would further accentuate parenting stress, thus creating a vicious cycle of maladaptiveness. The validity of the model in predicting adolescent achievement aspirations and perceived academic competence was tested at two time points over a 6-month interval. At Time 1, the cross-sectional model was tested in 510 mother-adolescent dyads. Results of path analysis revealed substantial gender differences. For girls, adolescent emotional autonomy, maternal academic distress, parenting alliance and parenting self-efficacy contributed to parenting stress. Parenting stress had a direct effect on parenting style and indirect effect on girls' achievement aspirations and perceived academic competence through the mediation of parental control. For boys, all the stressors except emotional autonomy contributed to parenting stress. Parenting stress had a direct effect on parenting style. However, parenting style did not mediate the effect of parenting stress as both parental control and parental responsiveness failed to explain boys' outcomes. Instead, boys' emotional autonomy contributed directly to lower levels of achievement aspirations and perceived academic competence. / Lai, Pui Yee. / "June 2007." / Adviser: Catherine S. K. Tang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-01, Section: B, page: 0717. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-165). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Emotion language use provides insight into a person's emotional landscape. However, little is known about how preschool aged children and their parents use emotion language in their real world interactions. To address the shortcomings of the current body of empirical work on naturally occurring emotion language, this dissertation asks the following four research questions: 1) How do children and parents use emotion words in their daily lives?; 2) How is children's emotion language related to parents' emotion language?; 3) How is emotion language use related to emotional functioning?; and 4) How does emotion language in a lab setting compare to a natural setting? This dissertation implements a naturalistic methodology tool to answer the above questions. Thirty-five preschool aged children and their parents were recruited to participate in a two-wave longitudinal study in which the children wore a digital recording device for one day at each of the time points to capture acoustic information about the emotion language and behaviors they and their parents use in their daily lives. Additionally, participants completed a traditional laboratory based paradigm used to study emotion language within families. Parents also completed self-report measures related to emotion functioning for themselves and their child. Results indicate that children and their parents use high rates of positive emotion but very low rates of negative emotion in their naturally occurring interactions. This is different from lab based paradigms that elicit high rates of both positive and negative emotion language from children and parents. Next, children's use of emotion words tends to match the emotion language of their mothers more than their fathers but gender of the child also plays an important role. Very little support emerged for the emotion regulation model, as evidenced by children who cry and whine the most and who have the most behavioral problems tending to use negative emotions the most. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that emotion language reflects emotional state rather than regulates it. And, finally, the ecological validity of laboratory studies of emotion word usage is called into question by the independence of emotion language elicited in the lab and the natural expression of emotion words in a natural setting. Implications for researchers conducting work in the area of emotion language and emotional development are discussed. / text

The association between psychogenic knee pain in adolescent girls and parent-child behavior that involves (1) a high degree of control on the part of parents and (2) a high degree of submission on the part of adolescent daughters was investigated. The subjects, between the ages of 13 and 16 years, were patients of five doctors whom they were consulting about chronic knee pain. The doctors categorized each patient as either having "organic evidence" associated with their pain complaint (n=18) or "no organic evidence" (n=12). Each patient completed the Intrex Questionnaire: Short Forms B and C (Benjamin, 1988) which provided a set of data that descibed the daughters' perceptions of .their mothers' and fathers' behavior in relation to them and also the daughters' own behavior in relation to both parents. Similarity of the groups in terms of age, socioeconomic status and severity of pain was confirmed. Between-groups comparisons of the Intrex data yielded two significant differences. Daughters in the psychogenic pain group perceived their mothers as being both more controlling toward and more submissive to their daughters than did daughters in the organic group. Hypothesized differences between the groups regarding fathers' controlling behavior and daughters' submissive behavior were not supported. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Paternal environmental experiences are significant predictors of developmental outcomes in offspring and can occur even in the absence of paternal care. Although there has been a recent focus on the role of environmentally induced changes in the male germline in producing these effects, the potential mediating role of mothers has not been investigated. A role for mothers in the transmission of paternal effects has been well acknowledged in behavioral ecology, which predicts that females will dynamically adjust their reproductive investment in response to the qualities of their mate. In the current thesis offspring development was examined in response two contrasting paternal experiences. Both chronic food restriction (FR) and social enrichment induce changes in mate maternal investment. Significantly, measures of anxiety in social enriched and isolated males are correlated with mate maternal behavior. In the case of paternal FR, increases in pre- and postnatal maternal investment were observed in mates, an effect that appeared to be driven by female discrimination of FR versus control-fed (CF) males. Further, the detrimental effects of paternal FR on offspring development were only observed when offspring were sired through embryo transfer (i.e., females mated with CF but received embryo from FR father), suggesting that females may adjust reproductive investment in response to life-histories of their mate. The studies presented within this thesis describe how paternal experience can influence mate maternal investment in laboratory studies and how these paternally-induced maternal effects can be experimentally dissociated from experience-dependent germline changes to reveal the unique contributions of each parent upon offspring development. The results are discussed within the context of epigenetic inheritance, the transmission of disease and their implications for Lamarckian inheritance.

Parental differential treatment (PDT), the within-family differences in parenting experienced by siblings (Rivers & Stoneman, 2008), has been linked to detrimental adjustment outcomes for children (e.g., Conger & Conger, 1994). The primary goal of this research was to more closely examine how differential treatment in two domains of parent-child relations-displays of warmth and hostility- were associated with child outcomes. A secondary data analysis was conducted on a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) of a parent training intervention. Participants in this sample were high risk children and families, and they were randomly assigned to one of three groups: an intensive parent training program, the parent training program plus a sibling intervention, or the community control group. Data were collected by multiple methods and from multiple reporting agents. Using baseline data from children (both older and younger siblings), mothers, observers and teachers, this study examined PDT agreement across two or more informants and whether PDT agreement was linked to child outcomes and also explored the extent to which these PDT domains were associated with both older and younger sibling's antisocial behavior. Using data collected at baseline and conclusion of the intervention from multiple informants, the study investigated whether the parenting intervention moderated the effect of PDT and the extent to which PDT was malleable. Agreement across two or more reporting agents of high PDT, especially for PDT-Hostility, was associated with worse outcomes for those children compared to children in the more egalitarian group. This research replicated previous studies in demonstrating that PDT is associated with negative child outcomes in some circumstances even when controlling for other child factors. The results from exploratory analyses in this study do not provide support for the idea that PDT is altered after participation in a parenting intervention; however, the findings do provide some evidence that the intervention moderates PDT. Specifically, negative PDT directed at the older sibling was more likely to be associated with negative outcomes in the absence of the intervention. Potential explanations for these findings are presented, and implications for future research are discussed.

The Reformulated theory of learned helplessness emphasizes maladaptive explanatory style and its influence on depression, achievement, health, and coping. Individuals who habitually explain unpleasant/uncontrollable events by internal, stable and global causes (and good events by external, unstable, specific causes) are said to have a maladaptive explanatory style. Researchers speculate that negative life events (such as parental divorce or death) contribute to the development of this style. Researchers have sought to explain adjustment-related difficulties by focusing on traumatic life events, such as divorce or death of a parent and their adverse effects on childhood development.Literature concerning the correlates of father absence, divorce, parental death, attachment and stressful life events shows that closeness to parents can mediate the impact of these events on adjustment and development. The mediating effects of closeness to parent may explain why not all children who experience these events actually develop maladaptive explanatory styles.This investigation examined the relations between Negative Life Events, Closeness to Parent and Explanatory Style. By looking at these relations, we can determine which variable is more influential in developing the maladaptive style. It was expected that Closeness to Parent would be a better predictor of explanatory style than Negative Life Events.Participants were 86 college students who completed a questionnaire that assessed explanatory style, closeness to parent, negative life events, and level of depression. Multiple regression was used to determine the significant predictors of explanatory style and depression. Results showed that none of the variables were significant predictors of explanatory style. Recent life events, closeness to mother and explanatory style were significant predictors of depression. Discriminant analysis was used to determine whether participants whose parents were divorced could be differentiated from those whose parent's marriage was intact using explanatory style, closeness to parent and depression as predictors. Results showed no significant differences between these groups. Sample group means for depression and life events were higher than those from normative studies for the Beck Depression Inventory and the Life Experience Survey.As the literature showed, closeness to parent and negative life events should account for some of the variance in the maladaptive style. The absence of these relations may be attributed to theoretical and methodological issues concerning closeness to parent and explanatory style.However, since this sample had high levels of depression and life stress, theoretically these relations should have been found. This points to the importance of the problems discussed.Prospective longitudinal studies, although costly and time consuming may be useful in determining the antecedents of a maladaptive explanatory style. / Department of Psychological Science

To date, researchers who have explored the complexity of childhood bereavement have utilized unstandardized assessment instruments and/or have independently evaluated specific constructs rather than factoring in the dimensionality of loss. The purpose of this study was to use parents' completion of established instruments--the Child Behavior Checklist and the Parenting Stress Index--to examine the multivariate shared relationship between characteristics of bereaved children referred for counseling--their ages, genders, ethnicities, types of loss, and life stressors--and their behavioral manifestations as well as the relationship between these characteristics and levels of parent-child relational stress. Utilizing archival clinical files, I examined these characteristics from bereaved children (N = 98) whose parents sought counseling services from two university-based counseling clinics. The sample consisted of 67 boys and 31 girls between the ages 3 and 11 years old (M = 6.28). The majority of participants (67%, n = 66) identified as Caucasian, 10% (n = 10) as African American, 10% (n = 10) as Hispanic/Latino, 6% as Bi-racial (n = 6), 4% as Native American (n = 4), and 2% as Asian (n = 2). A canonical correlational analyses (CCA) was conducted to examine relationship between characteristics of children and their subsequent behavioral manifestations. The full model was found to be statistically significant using the Wilks’s λ = .611 criterion, F(25, 328.41) = 1.862, p = .008. The R2 type effect size was .389, which indicates the full model explains about 39% of the variance shared between the two variable sets. A second CCA was conducted to explore the relationship between characteristics of bereaved children and levels of parent-child relational stress. The full model was found statistically to be significant using the Wilks’s λ = .790 criterion, F(10, 154) = 1.926, p = .045. The R2 type effect size was .210, which indicates the full model explains about 21% of the variance shared between the two variable sets. Overall, correlational findings from this study provided insight into bereaved children’s manifestations of loss and levels of parent-child relational stress as contingent upon specific characteristics. Specifically, results indicated a strong relationship between age and bereaved children’s behavioral manifestations. This finding reinforced the importance for clinicians to understand developmental implications when working with bereaved children. Furthermore, caregivers who reported minimal overall external stressors also reported less parent-child relational interference. This finding further emphasizes the importance for caregivers to maintain utmost stability for bereaved children.