Negative emotion differentiation (NED) refers to experiencing negative emotions as being different from each other (e.g., sadness vs. fear). Prior literature has linked emotion regulation (ER) to internalizing psychopathology. The current study in- vestigates how NED among pre-adolescent youth may moderate this relationship. Participants include 106 youth ranging from ages 7 to 11 (55.6% male, Mage = 9.3 years). NED scores were computed as the variance in self-reports of nega- tive emotions across multiple time points. ER processes were measured using autobiographical emotion interviews and resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) during a baseline task. Children’s anxiety and depression symptoms were evaluated using validated measures. NED is expected to (1) relate to depressive symptoms, (2) moderate the effectiveness and selection of both adaptive and maladaptive ER strategies, and (3) moderate the relationship between RSA and psychopathology. Initial correlational and independent t-test analyses revealed that NED was not directly associated with psychopathology. Instead, NED was positively related to separation anxiety for youth who did not use support-seek- ing strategies. NED was also higher for children who did not use cognitive re- framing strategies compared to children who did. Additional analyses revealed that resting RSA had a protective effect against some facets of psychopathology based on specific regulation strategies used. These findings have implications for inter- ventions (e.g., mindfulness) that can improve mental health outcomes for youth.

KEYWORDS: Emotion differentiation, emotion regulation, child psychopa- thology, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)

Fear and disgust are both evoked in response to a potential threat and motivate a broad range of behaviors and beliefs but knowledge of children’s experiences and understanding of these two emotions as different is limited. The purpose of this dissertation was to a) examine age-related differences in children’s differentiation of fear and disgust, b) investigate whether children’s attention differs across a disgust or fear context and relates to individual differences in how children understand and experience these emotions, and c) examine whether individual differences in important aspects of emotion development relate to children’s emotions and beliefs about a potential threat with real-world implications – tap water.

To capture fear and disgust intensity, 69 four- to seven-year-old children were interviewed about how scared and disgusted typical fear and disgust elicitors made them feel. Children were interviewed about their water-related preferences, emotions, and beliefs. To capture orienting, total looking duration, and disengagement attention processes, children’s visual attention towards and away from a disgust OR fear-relevant stimulus during a free-play episode was recorded. Children were invited to approach/engage with evocative items and rated the intensity of their fear and disgust towards each. Children’s differentiation of fear and disgust was captured by correlating fear and disgust intensity ratings for the items presented hypothetically (interviews) and in person.

Findings revealed that age did not relate to differentiation of fear and disgust. Children differentiated between fear and disgust more strongly when responding to disgust than fear elicitors and when asked about them hypothetically (interview) than in person. Attention patterns across the fear and disgust contexts were similar and did not relate to reported experiences of fear or disgust, or children’s preferences, negative emotions, and beliefs about tap water. Children who reported more intense fear and disgust and those who demonstrated less awareness of the distinctions between fear and disgust reported more negative emotions towards tap water. Understanding of fear and disgust and their appraisals of tap water as potentially threatening should be addressed early in development to promote more sustainable water solutions and greater acceptance of tap water.

Parents’ behaviors surrounding emotions, which broadly encompass responses to children’s emotions, discussion of emotion, and parents’ regulation and expression of their own emotions all serve to inform (i.e., socialize) the child about the appropriate and acceptable ways to experience and share emotions within the family system. These emotion socialization behaviors contribute to a wide variety of child outcomes across the lifespan, including the transmission of emotion socialization practices from parent to child. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate how first-time parents’ self-awareness surrounding their subjective childhood experiences of emotion socialization informed their plans for future emotion socialization practices with their child. Narrative identity methodologies were used to capture how self-awareness of emotion development can be relevant to (a) personal identification of change and stability in facets of emotion development across childhood and adulthood (e.g., remembered childhood experiences, current emotional functioning, etc.), (b) shaping the socialization plans and practices of new parents, and (c) overall psychological well-being.One hundred first-time parents (Mage = 30.14 years, SD = 0.52, 66 mothers) with a child under the age of 3 years participated. Participants completed a survey in which they were asked to reflect on their emotional experiences, both in childhood with their parents and currently as a first-time parent with their own child, by responding to series of open-ended narrative prompts. The narrative prompts captured a sad childhood emotional experience, angry emotional experience, and a turning point in which they recalled wanting to parent their child’s emotions differently than their parents. Individual differences in how first-time parents explored and made meaning of these childhood emotional experiences were conceptualized as self-awareness and used two narrative identity themes: exploratory processing and meaning making. These narrative themes were coded within the narratives of negative childhood emotional experiences. Greater exploratory processing and greater meaning making were expected to relate to planned emotion socialization and wellbeing. To capture well-being, emotional functioning, retrospective socialization practices of their parents in childhood, and their own socialization practices, self-report measures were also administered. Findings revealed that first-time parents’ reported having plans for more supportive and less non-supportive emotion socialization only when they remembered their parents in childhood providing more non-supportive and less supportive emotion socialization. Examination of narrative themes found greater exploratory processing was associated with plans for more supportive reactions, whereas greater meaning making was associated with wellbeing. Remembered emotion socialization was tested as a possible moderator of self-awareness and planned emotion socialization. First, results found that participants who remembered more non-supportive parental reactions and engaged in higher exploratory processing reported plans for less non-supportive reactions. Second, participants who remembered less supportive reactions and illustrated higher meaning making reported plans for less non-supportive reactions. The integration of remembered emotion socialization, exploratory processing, and meaning making predicted plans for optimal emotion socialization practices (more supportive and less non-supportive) in first-time parents. This dissertation illustrated that a multi-method assessment of emotion socialization within and across childhood and adulthood is necessary to understand how the subjective experiences of emotional childhood events contribute to planned emotion socialization as a first-time parent. Finally, the results emphasize how the narrative identity approach can be used in emotion development research to investigate the adaptive implications of self-awareness on emotional functioning and planned emotion socialization.

Family storytelling is an essential cultural tool for processing impactful social and emotional events. While storytelling has been studied extensively in other fields such as anthropology (e.g., storytelling as a cultural practice) and within psychology (e.g., narrative psychology), there is an existing gap in developmental affective science in understanding how family storytelling may shape children’s emotion regulation. Much work in narrative psychology suggests that telling stories within one’s family contributes to children’s identity development and can bolster feelings of connectedness and belongingness with prior generations. Furthermore, children in families that discuss negative life experiences together typically have better self-regulatory competence than children in families that do not. In this project, I posit that the family story is a rich, contextual method to study factors related to emotional development and emotional socialization that shapes how children interpret and manage life experiences. I examined three facets of parental family storytelling– narrative coherence, narrative strategy (redemption vs. contamination), and mention of specific emotion regulation strategies- as they relate to children’s use of emotion regulation strategies. Correlational analyses revealed that parents’ family story narrative coherence was related to children’s use of cognitive reappraisal, even when accounting for parents’ cultural values and children’s age. Additionally, I used qualitative content analysis to analyze the different sociocultural factors parents mentioned in their stories, and the reasons parents believed telling the family story was important. Results indicated that family stories contain rich detail about many relevant and impactful relational, environmental, and historical factors that may shape emotion socialization practices and children’s emotional development. There were seven reasons for storytelling that emerged from parents’ responses: supporting identity development, connecting generations, sharing and discussing feelings, teaching lessons, remembering history, passing on culture, and gaining an understanding of others. This project suggests that telling stories about family history could be a new direction for developmental affective science to measure individuals’ emotional ecology and emotion processes across generations.

Children frequently experience social ambiguity, where the context and expectations for an interaction are unclear. Responses to ambiguity can vary greatly, potentially due to children’s differing challenge and threat appraisals. Although we know children use information from their environments in the process of making appraisals, what specific information children use to inform their challenge and threat appraisals is still an open question. My dissertation aimed to examine factors that may contribute to children’s challenge and threat appraisals and subsequent social problem-solving behavior in ambiguous social contexts. These included the tendency to make challenge appraisals across discrete emotion contexts, emotion regulation ability, and different social motivations. To address these aims, I utilized an existing dataset from a larger study of children’s physiology and emotion regulation. The focus of this dissertation was on several tasks, including an interview about children’s previous experiences of different emotions, and three ambiguous social interactions in which (1) the experimenter wore a scary Halloween mask, (2) the child and experimenter took turns playing a game, and (3) the experimenter gave the child an unwanted prize. Interval coding (10-s intervals) captured the extent to which children used 4 social problem-solving behaviors: expressed positive affect, speech, laughter, and approach. Children’s appraisal tendencies were derived from their responses during the interview. Parent reports were used to characterize children’s emotion regulation abilities, shyness, and social disinterest. Data analysis included hierarchical multiple regression, Cox regression, and binary logistic regression. Results indicated that children’s challenge appraisals may relate to their social problem-solving behavior in some emotion contexts, but not others. This relationship was shown to be further qualified by the social nature of the appraisal made. Children’s emotion regulation, shyness, and social disinterest were not related to children’s appraisals, but were related to social problem-solving. Greater emotion regulation and shyness predicted quicker social problem-solving during the ambiguous scary task, whereas greater social disinterest predicted slower social problem-solving during the same task. In addition, shyness was related to less social problem-solving in general and in the ambiguous frustration task, and slower social problem-solving in the ambiguous frustration task. Finally, social disinterest was associated with less social problem-solving in general and in the ambiguous frustration task as well. This dissertation’s contributions are both methodological and theoretical. Novel methods included asking children to recall personally meaningful experiences in which they felt different emotions, and examining children’s in-vivo responses to ambiguous social situations. Overall, this dissertation contributes to our understanding how variations in children’s regulatory abilities and social motivations relate to the cognitive appraisal process and subsequent behavior, providing more insight into the long-term impacts of children’s earlier life experiences.

This dissertation investigates the dynamics of interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) between emerging adults (ages 18-25) and their parents. IER refers to the management of one’s own emotions through the support of another person. Although emerging adulthood is often characterized by identity exploration and increased independence from family, many youth remain reliant on and highly sensitive to the socialization efforts of their parents. Despite the critical role of parental influence during the transitional phase of emerging adulthood, research on the day-to-day IER processes within the parent-child relationship remains limited. Drawing on previous findings that highlight how parental autonomy support contextualizes the perceived effectiveness of parent-provided IER (Newman & Davis, 2023), my dissertation further examines the frequency, quality, and goals of IER interactions between emerging adults and their parents, particularly considering how past experiences shape current and future IER endeavors. I also explore how these perceptions inform youths’ willingness to seek and engage in IER, considering factors such as individual intrapersonal emotion regulation (ER), tendencies to utilize IER in everyday life, parental autonomy support, and cultural contexts. This online study consisted of multiple questionnaires, a semi-structured interview, and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) of parent-provided IER. Eighty-four emerging adult college students (Mage = 19.81 years, 73.8% women) completed questionnaires assessing their emotion IER tendencies, relationship quality with their parents, and parental autonomy support. Youth recounted general instances of receiving IER from parents, and reported on their parents’ IER behaviors, the perceived effectiveness of the IER, and their willingness to seek out subsequent IER with their parents. They also reported on aspects of their family background or culture that may influence how emotions are dealt with in their family. Lastly, they participated in a 10-day daily diary survey, wherein they reported on day-to-day IER interactions with their parents. Findings indicated that youth who remembered past parent-youth IER interactions as effective and had higher parent-child relatedness (i.e., relationship quality) reported increased desire for subsequent parent-provided IER. Furthermore, for father-provided IER, the association between IER effectiveness and subsequent IER was stronger for participants from families that engage in culturally normalized suppression. Neither specific IER strategies nor parental autonomy support related to youths’ desire for subsequent parent-provided IER. I also found unexpected gender differences––for mothers, both autonomy support and relatedness were associated with youths’ perceived effectiveness of parent-provided IER; for fathers, only autonomy support was a significant predictor. Moreover, youths’ general tendencies to utilize IER in their daily life did not relate to parent-provided IER effectiveness. Lastly, on average participants engaged in parent-provided IER approximately once in the span of 10 days, were more likely to receive IER from their mothers than their fathers, and effectiveness of EMA mother-provided IER effectiveness was positively related to maternal autonomy support. Ultimately, insights gained from this study highlight the importance of perceived IER effectiveness, parental autonomy support, parent-child relatedness, and the cultural context in shaping IER processes within families. These findings contribute to the burgeoning field of IER by providing practical insights into improving ER in this important familial relationship, and by shedding light on the unique dynamics of IER during the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Children interact with peers in their daily lives and sometimes help, share, or otherwise do something to benefit someone else. The opportunities they encounter to engage in prosocial behavior often overlap with their own and their peers' experiences of a range of emotions. The current study investigated the effects of children's own negative emotion and the effects of peer emotion on prosocial behavior. Children participated in one of four different emotion conditions in this study which had a 2 (child emotion: neutral or negative) x 2 (peer emotion: neutral or negative) factorial design. Children either played a version of a game designed to make them feel negative emotion or to feel neutral (child emotion) and then watched a version of a video of a peer who either expressed negative emotion or described feeling neutral (peer emotion). Children had multiple subsequent opportunities to behave prosocially towards the peer. Parent reports of children's emotion regulation and six different aspects of children's social cognition were used to investigate individual differences that relate to prosocial behavior that would potentially be moderated by own and other emotion. Results supported the hypothesis that children's own negative emotion experiences hinder prosocial behavior, though contrary to what was hypothesized, exposure to a peer's negative emotion had no effect on prosocial behavior. In addition, the links between individual differences in emotion regulation and social cognition and prosocial behavior were moderated by own and other emotion. Specifically, when children played the negative emotion version of the game, better social cognition was associated with greater sharing and lower social cognition was associated with less sharing. However, when children played the neutral version of the game, greater social cognition skills were associated with less prosocial behavior, and greater emotion regulation was associated with slower prosocial behavior. These findings are discussed in terms of how they advance our understanding of children's social information processing and subsequent prosocial behavior in different emotion contexts. Findings also indicate the importance of ecologically valid investigations of prosocial behavior, including examination of the emotion context, to better understand how children engage in prosocial behavior towards peers in their daily lives.