فرزندپروری گرم و سخت به عنوان واسطه ارتباط تنظیم احساسات مادران و نوجوانان

Maternal hostility/rejection and warmth were considered as potential mediators of the relation between mothers' and adolescents' emotion regulation. Participants were first-year high school students living in Ankara, Turkey and their mothers (N = 365). Scales assessing emotion regulation difficulties and maternal hostility/rejection and warmth were administered to both the adolescents and their mothers. Maternal hostility/rejection, but not warmth, mediated the relation between maternal and adolescent emotion regulation. For girls there was, additionally, a direct effect of maternal emotion regulation. The different roles played by parental rejection and parental warmth in the development of adolescents' emotion regulation accord with arguments that socialization occurs in different domains and that rejection and warmth are not aspects of the same domain.

Considerable research has been directed toward understanding the role of parenting in the development of children's and adolescents' abilities to modulate emotional responses flexibly, so that they are able both to meet their own individual goals as well as to respond to the demands of the situation in which they find themselves. Much of the research has focused on parents' coaching and dismissing behaviors as well as parents' reactions to their children's emotion regulation (ER) or lack thereof (for reviews see Denham et al., 2007 and Denham et al., 2011). Although most of the research has been conducted with young children there is also a growing body of research on the socialization of ER in adolescents (e.g., see special issue of Social Development edited by Klimes-Dougan and Zeman, 2007, Bariola et al., 2011 and Brand and Klimes-Dugan, 2010) as well as on how ER develops over the life span (e.g., Garnefski and Kraaij, 2006, Gross, 2001 and John and Gross, 2004). In contrast to the work on emotion coaching and responses to emotional behavior, there has been relative neglect of the role of parents' ability to cope with their own emotional arousal and its impact on children's ER abilities (Katz et al., 2012 and Morris et al., 2007). The present study, conducted with adolescents, addressed the relation between mothers' ER and that of their adolescent children. Additionally, it assessed the role of parenting behavior as a mediator between maternal and adolescent ER.

The present study is just a beginning in trying to understand the nature of the relation between parents' ability to self-regulate their emotions and that of their offspring. The study was cross-sectional and so inferences about causality cannot be made: Longitudinal data need to be collected. Information was obtained through self-report, and observational data would be very useful to augment the questionnaire data. The measures were administered only to mothers and the situation with respect to fathers might be quite different. Although we have suggested that boys might be more likely to model the self-regulation of their fathers it could be that fathers have little impact in this area of development, given that they are more reluctant than mothers to talk about emotions (Dindia and Allen, 1992 and Dolgin and Berndt, 1997). Thus children would be less likely to observe at least some of the ways their fathers dealt with emotions. Also, there might be a reduced impact of fathers generally, given that mothers have been shown to be more involved than fathers in their children's emotion socialization (Garside and Klimes-Dougan, 2002 and Klimes-Dougan and Zeman, 2007). The standardized measure of parental rejection and warmth that was used asked about parents' behaviors, and it would be desirable to ask more specifically about maternal and paternal practices in future attempts to unravel the separate contributions of mothers and fathers. Nevertheless, the study does make a contribution to the existing literature. It involves a large sample from a non-English-speaking country. It addresses parental emotion socialization in adolescence, a period less researched with respect to this aspect of development than that of infancy through middle childhood. It deals with mechanisms underlying similarities between adolescents and parents in their ability to regulate emotions and it sheds light on an important distinction between parental lack of warmth and rejection in children's development.