Maternal and paternal unsupportive parenting and children's externalizing symptoms: The mediational role of children's attention biases to negative emotion

Abstract This study examined children's duration of attention to negative emotions (i.e., anger, sadness, fear) as a mediator of associations among maternal and paternal unsupportive parenting and children's externalizing symptoms in a sample of 240 mothers, fathers, and their preschool children (Mage = 4.64 years). The multimethod, multi-informant design consisted of three annual measurement occasions. Analysis of maternal and paternal unsupportive parenting as predictors in latent difference changes in children's affect-biased attention and behavior problems indicated that children's attention to negative emotions mediated the specific association between maternal unsupportive parenting and children's subsequent increases in externalizing symptoms. Maternal unsupportive parenting at Wave 1 predicted decreases in children's attention to negative facial expressions of adults from Wave 1 to 2. Reductions in children's attention to negative emotion, in turn, predicted increases in their externalizing symptoms from Wave 1 to 3. Additional tests of children's fearful distress and hostile responses to parental conflict as explanatory mechanisms revealed that increases in children's fearful distress reactivity from Wave 1 to 2 accounted for the association between maternal unsupportive parenting and concomitant decreases in their attention to negative emotions. Results are discussed in the context of information processing models of family adversity and developmental psychopathology.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Development and Psychopathology

• Publication date

  2021-05-20

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1017/S0954579421000171PMID 34011425PMCID PMC8605040
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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