Toddlers' context-varying emotions, maternal responses to emotions, and internalizing behaviors.

Children who display considerable negative affect early in life are at risk for later internalizing problems (Rothbart & Bates, 2006). Consideration of the context in which negative affect is displayed may more precisely predict which children are at risk for maladjustment (Eisenberg et al., 2001; Rothbart & Bates, 2006). For example, toddler fear expressed in low-threat contexts is more strongly associated with concurrent physiological reactivity and risk for later internalizing problems than is fear expressed in situations that more universally elicit distress (Buss, in press; Buss, Davidson, Kalin, & Goldsmith, 2004). As these studies suggest, toddlers’ displays of negative affect in situations where most toddlers remain neutral or experience pleasure represent emotion dysregulation and vulnerability to maladaptation. Just as research has identified that context matters regarding negative affect’s link to internalizing behaviors, so too might mothers make context-based decisions about which emotion-related behaviors are problematic. The context of negative affect displays may determine whether mothers perceive it as salient and, subsequently, whether it is problematic or extreme (Hane, Fox, Polak-Toste, Ghera, & Guner, 2006). That is, if a mother routinely encounters situations in which her child displays negative affect when other toddlers do not, she may perceive her child as more withdrawn, sad, or fearful (i.e., internalizing-spectrum behaviors). Together, these studies informed our hypothesis that negative affect displayed in low-threat situations would more strongly relate to maternal perceptions of internalizing problems than negative affect in high-threat situations. Children’s negative affect may also influence mothers’ responses to emotions (RTE), which include both verbal and behavioral reactions to toddlers’ expressions and comprise an important piece of the broader construct of emotion socialization (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). Inherent in current measures of RTE is the idea that parents react to their children’s negative emotional displays with either supportive (i.e., encouragement of emotion expression, problem-solving) or non-supportive (i.e., punishing expressions, minimizing children’s emotional experiences) strategies. For example, preschoolers’ negative reactivity was positively associated with mothers’ elaborative discussions of past negative emotion, suggesting that mothers may respond by encouraging emotion expression when they perceive their children as higher in negative affect (Laible, 2004). Yet, no relation was found between infants’ negative affect and mothers’ responding with emotion talk, suggesting that an evocative process may not develop until the toddler/preschool years (Garrett-Peters et al., 2008). Regarding context effects, Eisenberg and colleagues’ (1998) theorize that the context of children’s displayed emotion influences broader emotion socialization practices, but few empirical studies exist (particularly in toddlerhood) of how the context of negative affect relates to RTE. Consistent with previous expectations, we expected that both supportive and non-supportive RTE would relate more strongly to negative affect in low-threat situations at this age. Over time, mothers’ RTE may influence children’s development of internalizing problems through its effect on arousal and arousal regulation (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). Indeed, supportive RTE reduce young children’s arousal, allowing them to learn self-regulation of negative emotion (Spinrad et al., 2007; Spinrad, Stifter, Donelan-McCall, & Turner, 2004), protecting against internalizing problems (Hastings et al., 2008; Rubin, Burgess, & Hastings, 2002). Conversely, non-supportive RTE relate to children becoming overaroused and to poorly regulating their emotions, putting them at risk for internalizing behaviors (Eisenberg et al., 1999; Hastings & De, 2008; Rydell, Thorell, & Bohlin, 2007). Given that depression and anxiety, the major components of internalizing problems, appear to result from ineffective regulation of sadness and fear specifically (Kovacs & Lopez-Duran, 2010), and that one important mean by which young children develop emotion regulation capacities is through their parents’ reactions to emotions (Kopp, 1989), parental responses to sadness and fear were the major focus of the current study. Overall, we expected supportive RTE to have a negative relation and non-supportive RTE to have a positive relation to internalizing problems. Relations between RTE and internalizing problems, however, may not only be parent-driven processes. Children’s internalizing problems, as perceived by parents, may also elicit different RTE. In their heuristic model, Eisenberg et al. (1998) suggested that children’s emotional competence (or lack thereof in the case of internalizing problems) feeds back to influence parents’ RTE. Because mothers of more negative children display more supportive RTE such as emotion expression (Laible, 2004), it could be expected that internalizing problems would elicit supportive maternal RTE. Yet, Eisenberg and colleagues (1999) found that mothers’ punitive RTE were predicted by their perceptions of their daughters’ internalizing problems. However, children in that study were much older (6–12 years), and parents may react more negatively to older children who they expect to be better regulated. This relation would be less likely to occur during toddlerhood when children are still learning basic skills in the regulation of negative emotions. Overall, transactional influences between RTE and internalizing problems would be expected, with perceptions of internalizing problems more strongly predicting supportive than non-supportive RTE in toddlerhood. Few studies, especially in the toddler years when emotion socialization is particularly salient for later adjustment (Kopp, 1989; Spinrad et al., 2007), have examined individual differences in negative affect displays in various threatening contexts, or how context-specific affective displays relate concurrently and prospectively to internalizing problems and maternal RTE. Internalizing problems during toddlerhood appear to be predictive of later maladjustment (Mathiesen, Sanson, Stoolmiller, & Karevold, 2009). Understanding the specific contexts in which toddlers’ negative affect and mothers’ RTE relate to early internalizing problems will foster the development of appropriate prevention. Therefore, we examined the relations of toddlers’ observed negative affect in high- and low-threat contexts to maternal perceptions of internalizing problems and to mothers’ reported RTE for fear and sadness. Because out-of-context displays of distress are most related to risk for internalizing problems (Buss, in press) we predicted that negative affect displayed in low-threat situations would relate to maternal perceptions of internalizing problems and both supportive and non-supportive RTE more strongly than negative affect in high-threat situations. Subsequently, we examined transactional relations between maternal perceptions of internalizing problems and RTE across one year of toddlerhood. Specifically, a child-driven model, in which age 2 internalizing behaviors were posited to predict age 3 RTE, and a parent-driven model, in which age 2 RTE were posited to predict age 3 internalizing behaviors, were tested against our hypothesized reciprocal model, in which internalizing at age 2 predicted RTE at age 3 and RTE at age 2 predicted internalizing at age 3 (Figure 1, top panel). We expected that internalizing problems would be predicted negatively by supportive and positively by non-supportive RTE. Finally, we hypothesized that maternal perceptions of internalizing problems would predict later supportive RTE. Figure 1 Top panel shows proposed reciprocal model of displayed affect, maternal responses to emotion, and toddler internalizing behaviors. Paths labeled A were constrained to zero to test the parent-driven model, whereas those labeled B were constrained to zero ...