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Chapter 8 - Parental Assistance with Children’s Extrinsic Emotion Regulation across Development

from Part III - Influence of Parenting on Child Emotion Regulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2024

By
Emily M. Cohodes  and
Dylan G. Gee
Edited by
Isabelle Roskam ,
James J. Gross  and
Moïra Mikolajczak
Isabelle Roskam
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
James J. Gross
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Moïra Mikolajczak
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
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Summary

Across development, parents play a critical role in assisting children in regulating emotions via extrinsic emotion regulation (ER). Cross-species evidence suggests that parental influences on corticolimbic circuitry – thought to underlie ER – peak in childhood and wane during the transition to adolescence as children increasingly rely on intrinsic regulation strategies. Gottman’s parental meta-emotion philosophy laid important groundwork for recent advances in assessment of parental assistance with children’s use of specific ER strategies, a line of work that has the potential to further understanding of how parents socialize children’s reliance on certain ER strategies. Initial evidence suggests that the strategies parents assist with may vary as a function of child age and parent-level factors such as psychopathology and reliance on specific intrinsic ER strategies. We discuss future directions in the study of parental assistance with children’s ER focused on further understanding normative developmental trajectories of parents’ assistance with specific ER strategies and neurobiological correlates of specific profiles of parental assistance.

Keywords

parental assistance with emotion regulationcorticolimbic circuitryemotion socializationmeta-emotion philosophy
Type
Chapter
Information
Emotion Regulation and Parenting , pp. 149 - 165
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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