(PS8-A20) The Mediating Role of Experiential Avoidance Between Maternal Emotion Regulation and Maternal Expressiveness

Identifying and regulating emotions is a common target in child intervention. Children’s ability to navigate emotions is influenced by parents’ emotion socialization behaviors, including expressiveness, wherein parents who do not discuss emotions in the family have children with worse regulatory capabilities (Gottman et al., 1996). While evidence shows that expressiveness predicts child pathology outcomes, much is unknown about what factors lead to expressiveness patterns (Hajal & Paley, 2020). It is possible that parents who are higher on nonacceptance and lower on awareness of emotions, as well as higher on experiential avoidance (EA), do not teach their children about emotions (Gottman et al., 1996), which may then lead to differences in how they express both positive and negative emotions. A greater understanding of how expressiveness patterns develop in parents would provide new targets for interventions that encourage parents to discuss and regulate emotions with their children.  The current study hypothesized that EA would significantly mediate the relation of both nonacceptance and lack of awareness to expressiveness patterns in mothers. 

Mothers (n=216, 85.7% White) participated in a longitudinal study when children were approximately aged 1 (T1), 2 (T2), and 3 (T3) years. The study used a planned cohort missingness design. Families were recruited at each timepoint. At T1 mothers reported on lack of awareness and nonacceptance of emotions (Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale; Gratz & Roemer, 2004). At T2, mothers reported on experiential avoidance (Action and Acceptance Questionnaire; Hayes et al., 2004). At T3 mothers reported on positive and negative expressiveness (Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire; Halberstadt et al., 1995).

A series of mediation models were conducted using SPSS PROCESS (Hayes, 2012), with EA mediating the relation of maternal emotion regulation capacity to emotion expressiveness. In all models, EA did not predict positive expressiveness; it was not explored further. In separate models, both nonacceptance (.224, [.037, .460]) and lack of awareness (.202, [.044, .456]) showed significant indirect relations with negative expressiveness, with higher levels of each predicting higher EA, which then predicted higher negative expressiveness. When considered together, only nonacceptance remained significant (.197, [.022, .440]), suggesting that for lack of awareness, the variance that is shared with nonacceptance is driving the effect in its simple model. For nonacceptance, both the variance that is shared, as well as a unique effect of nonacceptance, is driving the mediation. Analyses first examined families who participated at all time points (n=66). Multiple imputation was used for families who joined at later phases or were lost to attrition. All regression paths were replicated. 

Maternal emotion regulation and EA predict expression of negative emotions in the family, particularly in regard to maternal nonacceptance of emotions. When working with families where mothers are expressing higher amounts of negative emotion, it may be necessary to first target maternal EA and nonacceptance so that mothers can better model healthy approaches to emotions for their children.