It is such an honor to have received the Dissertation Research Grant in Developmental Psychology, which greatly assisted me in the completion of my dissertation research. The focus of my dissertation research was to better understand how caregivers shape the development of infants’ emotion regulation skills in the second year of life. It has been well-established that emotion regulation is a fundamental developmental capacity and that caregivers play an instrumental role in the socialization of this skill (Kopp, 1989; Eisenberg & Morris, 2002). The first two years of life represent a window of significant development in this ability, as emotion regulation shifts from being an externally to internally modulated process. Interactions within the infant-caregiver relationship play a pivotal role in supporting this transition.
Within this research base, there has generally been greater focus on delineating qualities of the infant-caregiver relationship that are associated with promoting infants’ emotion regulation (e.g., high levels of warmth and supportiveness and low levels of intrusiveness; Calkins, 1998; Eisenberg, Cumberland & Spinrad, 1998; Gottman, Katz & Hooven, 1996). There has been much less focus on investigating the relative effectiveness of the specific behaviors that caregivers use to regulate their infants’ emotions in real time. My dissertation addressed this gap by examining the moment-to-moment impact of different regulatory behaviors initiated by mothers (maternal regulatory attempts; MRAs) on: 1) infants’ displays of negative affect and 2) infants’ engagement in emotion regulation behaviors.
Another important objective of my research was to better understand whether mothers’ ability to select more effective regulation strategies was linked to mind-mindedness (i.e., the ability of caregivers to appreciate that infants’ behaviors are driven by their own internal mental states; Meins, 2013). Mind-mindedness has been previously associated with infants’ emotion regulation outcomes (McMahon & Newey, 2018; Zeegers et al., 2018), but it has yet to be examined whether this relationship operates via mothers’ real-time selection of regulatory strategies.
To answer these research questions, 82 mother-infant dyads completed a free-play interaction task at 3.5 and 7 months (from where mind-mindedness indices were coded), and a frustrating toy removal task between 12 to 24 months (from where MRAs, infant negative affect, and infant emotion regulation were coded).
During the toy removal task, mothers’ use of distraction (e.g., hand games, singing) and control strategies (e.g., providing the infant with a behavioral instruction) significantly predicted reductions in infants’ negative affect across 5-second intervals, controlling for differences in baseline negative emotion and temperamentally based regulation ability. Furthermore, infants’ greater engagement in independent emotion regulation was predicted by mothers’ total engagement in effective MRAs (i.e., distraction and control), rather than their total engagement in any MRAs. This finding highlights a unique role of MRAs that provide instrumental, structured assistance in the development of emotion regulation. Finally, mothers who were less attuned to their infants’ mental states during the free play task were less likely to select effective regulatory strategies during the toy removal task. Thus, levels of mind-mindedness measured in the first year of life may have predictive power of maternal behaviour into the second year of life.
Taken together, the findings from my dissertation highlight the positive influence of mothers’ in-the-moment regulatory behaviors in promoting the development of emotion regulation in the second year of life. The types of regulatory behaviors mothers use matter, as they are differentially effective at reducing real-time distress and promoting independent engagement in emotion regulation behaviors. Finally, given the link between mind-mindedness and MRAs, enhancing mothers’ ability to tune into their infants’ mental states may serve as a way of improving their ability to select effective regulatory strategies and manage their infants’ distress in real time.
References
Calkins, S. D. (1998). Toddler regulation of distress to frustrating events: Temperamental and maternal correlates. Infant Behavior and Development, 21(3), 379–395. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-6383(98)90015-7opens in new window
Eisenberg, N., Cumberland, A., & Spinrad, T. L. (1998). Parental socialization of emotion. Psychological Inquiry, 9(4), 241–273. https://doi.org/10.1207/15327965pli0904_1opens in new window
Eisenberg, N., & Morris, A. S. (2002). Children’s emotion-related regulation. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 30,189–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2407(02)80042-8opens in new window
Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1996). Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families: Theoretical models and preliminary data. Journal of Family Psychology, 10(3), 243–268. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.10.3.243opens in new window
Kopp, C. B. (1989). Regulation of distress and negative emotions: A developmental view. Developmental Psychology, 25(3), 343–354. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.25.3.343opens in new window
McMahon, C., & Newey, B. (2018). Non-attuned mind-mindedness, infant negative affect, and emotional availability: Assessing mind-mindedness during the still-face paradigm. Infancy, 23(6), 873–892. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12245opens in new window
Meins, E. (2013). Security of attachment and the social development of cognition. In Security of Attachment and the Social Development of Cognition. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203775912opens in new window
Zeegers, M. A. J., de Vente, W., Nikolić, M., Majdandžić, M., Bögels, S. M., & Colonnesi, C. (2018). Mothers’ and fathers’ mind-mindedness influences physiological emotion regulation of infants across the first year of life. Developmental Science, 21(6), e12689. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12689opens in new window