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Predictors of Discrepancies in Parents’ and Children’s Reports of Child Emotion Regulation

The ability to effectively regulate one’s emotions has been linked with many aspects of well-being. However, disagreement in parents’ and children’s reports of children’s emotion regulation presents significant measurement and conceptual challenges. This investigation aimed to identify predictors of these discrepancies from among demographic, psychopathology, and child emotional awareness measures and to examine patterns of discrepancies among three emotion types (i.e., anger, sadness, and worry) and three regulation “strategies” (i.e., inhibition, dysregulated expression, and coping). Sixty-one mother-child dyads (41 girls, mean age 9.3 years) participated. As hypothesized, age, child and parent report of psychopathology, and poor emotion awareness all emerged as significant predictors of discrepancy. Additionally, discrepancies for inhibition subscales across all three emotions were of a larger magnitude than the other subscales; the effect was more pronounced for sadness than worry. Overall, the findings suggest patterns of disagreements are not random but rather may provide unique information that could elucidate relations among emotion regulation, psychopathology, and other indices of functioning.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:vcu.edu/oai:scholarscompass.vcu.edu:etd-2672
Date29 January 2009
CreatorsHourigan, Shannon
PublisherVCU Scholars Compass
Source SetsVirginia Commonwealth University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceTheses and Dissertations
Rights© The Author

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