Three-year Trajectories of Emotional Expressiveness among Maltreating Mothers: The Role of Life Changes

Parents are perhaps the most direct and profound influences on children’s development of emotional competence. For example, how and what emotions parents express in the family has implications for children’s ability to understand and regulate their emotions. What is less well understood is what potential environmental or contextual factors impact parents’ emotional expressiveness, particularly in high-risk samples prone to atypical emotional expressiveness (e.g., deficits in the production and recognition of emotional expressions). The present longitudinal study examined the association between life changes and parents’ expression of positive and negative emotions, as well as, how these associations changed over time in a sample of maltreating mothers. Eighty-eight mothers with a substantiated history of physical abuse completed measures of emotional expressiveness and life changes experienced over the past 6 months when their children were in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Results indicated that life changes decreased over time, while parental emotional expressiveness remained stable. Moreover, life changes were associated across time with the expression of negative emotions, but were unrelated to expressions of positive emotions. Findings have important implications for understanding emotional expressiveness in high-risk samples.     

Stress at encoding,context at retrieval,and children’s narrative content

Research concerning the relations between stress and children’s memory has been primarily correlational and focused on memory volume and accuracy. In the current study, we experimentally manipulated 7- and 8-year-olds’ and 12- to 14-year-olds’ experienced stress during a to-be-remembered event to examine the effects of stress on the content of their memory. We further manipulated the degree of interviewer support at retrieval to determine whether it moderated the effects of stress at encoding on memory. Children’s age, gender, stress at encoding, and interviewer support all influenced the type of information included in their narrative reports. Most notably, across ages, children who experienced a more stressful event but were questioned in a supportive manner provided the largest ratio of terms representing internal states such as those about cognitions and emotions. Results suggest that how children process past events may be influenced by both the nature of the event itself and the context within which it is recalled.     

Language facilitates event memory in early childhood: Child comprehension,adult-provided linguistic support and delayed recall at 16 months

Adult-provided supportive language facilitates memory for the past in preverbal and verbal children. Work conducted with 18-month-olds indicates that children benefit from supportive adult language when tested after a 4-week delay but not when tested immediately after sequence demonstration; moreover, findings reveal that supportive language provided only at test may be more facilitative of recall after a delay relative to supportive language provided only at encoding. In the present study, we examined whether child language comprehension abilities moderated the extent to which preverbal children benefitted from supportive language provided at encoding and test. The findings indicated that child language comprehension and supportive language provided at encoding were unassociated with performance at baseline or immediate imitation; however, the moderating effect of child language comprehension on adult-provided supportive language at encoding and test was observed after a 1-week delay. Correlations revealed continuous associations between general comprehension scores and recall performance after the 1-week delay on sequences presented in the most supportive condition at encoding. Taken together, the presented findings reveal that the complex interplay between language and cognition is established in early childhood, with foundational relations emerging before children are capable of verbally reporting on the past.     

Perceived Social Status and Suicidal Ideation in Maltreated Children and Adolescents

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Recent decades have seen an alarming increase in rates of suicide among young people, including children and adolescents (“youth”)....