Getting to the heart of parenting: A pilot study of real-time, multimodal parental emotion correlates of emotion-related socialization

AI Summary

Within-parent lower RSA moments were marginally linked to increased scaffolding, while greater RSA plus recalled negative emotion during scaffolding predicted more scaffolding overall.
Concordance of RSA withdrawal and negative emotion related to reduced parental acknowledgement of the child's emotions.
Power analyses indicate future studies should include at least 200 parents to robustly assess between-parent correlates and inform interventions.

Dev Psychol. 2026 Jun 8. doi: 10.1037/dev0002208. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Parents’ emotions, including dynamic modulation of parasympathetically mediated vagal activity and experienced emotion, may facilitate engagement in supportive emotion-related socialization behavior (ERSB). The aim of this pilot study was to evaluate within-parent, real-time associations between parent vagal responsivity and recalled emotional experience with parent ERSB. Fifty parents (92.0% female) and their school-aged (6-12 years) daughters (M_childage = 9.18 years, SD_childage = 1.42 years; 44.9% White) completed a 6-min sad mood discussion followed by a video-mediated recall procedure to continuously rate their experienced emotion during the discussion. Dyadic electrocardiogram data were continuously collected. Coders coded parent ERSB from video-recorded discussions. Second-by-second estimates of parent respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an index of vagal functioning, experienced emotion, and ERSB were obtained. Preliminary results suggested that, on average, in moments when parents exhibited relatively lower RSA, they were marginally more likely to engage in scaffolding. However, parents who exhibited relatively greater RSA and recalled more negative emotions in moments when they engaged in scaffolding exhibited more scaffolding behavior across the discussion. Concordance in RSA withdrawal and negative emotions was related to less use of acknowledgment. Parents who work harder to regulate their own emotions may struggle to acknowledge their child’s emotions and scaffold their child’s emotion understanding or facilitate problem-solving. Power analyses suggest future investigations would benefit from larger samples of at least 200 parents to assess between-parent correlates of within-parent processes. Results bear implications for future research that can inform prevention and intervention programs that seek to enhance parent ERSB. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:42258287 | DOI:10.1037/dev0002208

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