Heterogeneous patterns of maternal emotion socialization and their association with maternal depression and maltreatment history: A person-centered approach

초록

Background: The influence of parent's emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs) on children, and predictors of such ERSBs has been studied extensively. However, to our knowledge, no study used a person-centered approach for subtyping the parental ERSB patterns and identifying parental characteristics that could discriminate the patterns. Objectives: The present study explored establishing heterogeneous maternal ERSBs and confirmed whether mothers' depression and maltreatment experienced in childhood are predictive of the subtypes. Participants and setting: In Korean, 695 mothers of 7-12-year-old children participated in the study. We conducted a latent profile analysis (LPA) using the six reaction categories of the Korean version of the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale (K-CCNES). We compared the characteristics of children and mothers among the derived classes and conducted a multinomial regression analysis to evaluate the predictors for each class. Results: Five classes emerged based on the LPA: "restrained" (25.0%), "ineffective" (19.0%), "harsh" (7.3%), "dismissive" (28.9%), and "supportive" (19.7%). Demographics, children's behavioral problems, maternal depression, and maltreatment history showed differences between the subgroups. Maternal depression and experiences of emotional neglect contributed to differentiating the negative ERSBs subgroups from positive styles. Conclusions: We were able to categorize mothers into subgroups displaying heterogeneous patterns of ERSBs. While maternal depression was the strongest predictor of negative patterns, mothers' emotional neglect experiences were an additional characteristic that uniquely predicted the lack of supportive responses to children's negative emotions. Therefore, exploring maternal emotional states and maltreatment experiences could be helpful for clinicians seeking to establish intervention strategies to improve parental ERSBs.

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