(PS5-40) Maternal Expressivity’s Relation to Child Anxiety Outcomes Through Child Effortful Control and Emotion Regulation: A Serial Mediation Model

Treatment for child anxiety, one of the most common psychological disorders (Barlow, 2000), often targets environmental factors that may be influencing the client's symptoms. A factor to consider is expressivity, or parents’ expression of their emotions. Expressivity may impact a child’s ability to understand and navigate emotions (Bariola et al., 2011). Further, patterns of expressivity may prime children to attend to their environment differently. For example, children in families with high negative expressivity may be hyper-vigilant for negative emotions in others, and therefore have difficulty shifting away from ambiguous or negative stimuli. This difficulty could present as lower effortful control (EC), or executive attention skills (Rothbart & Bates, 2006). Children who struggle to shift attention may then be less likely to effectively regulate their emotions due to over-interpreting stimuli as negative (Suveg et al., 2010). Prolonged experiences of struggling to effectively regulate may then promote anxiety symptoms (Weems & Silverman, 2006). Thus, the current study hypothesized that heightened negative expressivity would predict lower child EC, which would then predict lower child regulation, and higher anxiety. 

Participants were 149 mother-child dyads (57.7% male, 82.8% White) who participated at child ages 3 (T1), 4 (T2), and 5 (T3). At T1, mothers reported on their patterns of expressivity (Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire; Halbetstadt et al., 1995) and their child’s levels of EC (Child Behavior Questionnaire [CBQ]; Rothbart, 1996). At T2, mothers reported on their child’s emotion regulation (CBQ; Rothbart, 1996). At T3, mothers reported on their child’s anxiety levels (Preschool Anxiety Scale; Spence et al., 2001). 

Two serial mediation models were conducted using Mplus version 7.3 (Muthén & Muthén, 2012), with child EC and emotion dysregulation, respectively, mediating the relation of maternal expressivity to child anxiety. One model was conducted for each type of expressivity (i.e. positive, negative). In the positive model, expressivity positively predicted EC (B = 0.44, 95% CI [0.06, 7.78], p = .004) while in the negative model, expressivity negatively predicted EC (B = -0.16, 95% CI [-0.24, -0.07] p = .003). In both models, EC positively predicted emotion regulation. The total indirect effect was significant in the positive model (B = 0.07, 95% CI [0.01, 0.16]). The total indirect effect in the negative model was trending towards significance (B = -.05, 90% CI [-0.11, -0.01]).

Maternal expressivity, child EC, and child regulation play important roles in child anxiety outcomes. Positive and negative expressivity’s relation to child EC has a downstream effect on child regulation. Encouraging parents to engage in higher levels of positive expression and lower levels of negative expression may promote better effortful control in children, helping their long term emotion regulation skills.