Child Emotional Reactivity Differentiates Vulnerability to Paternal Punitive/Minimizing Emotion Socialization

ABSTRACT

Extreme levels of preschool sadness hallmark emotion regulation difficulties and early depression risk. Emotion socialization theory proposes that parents’ punitive or minimizing reactions can heighten children's sadness. Yet children's constitutionally‐based emotional reactivity may amplify or buffer such forms of parental socialization. We tested whether children's emotional reactivity, indexed at the neural level using the Late Positive Potential (LPP), moderated longitudinal associations between punitive/minimizing reactions and children's sadness. Participants were 121 preschoolers (59% girls) and their parents. At child age 3, mothers and fathers reported on their own punitive and minimizing reactions to children's negative emotions, providing separate indices of maternal and paternal behaviors. At age 4, children completed a passive viewing task to assess neural responses to positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. At age 5, children's sadness was indexed via parent report. Results revealed that children's neural reactivity to positive stimuli moderated the link between paternal, but not maternal, punitive/minimizing reactions and children's sadness. Paternal punitive/minimizing reactions predicted higher sadness at lower levels of child positive reactivity but lower sadness at higher levels of reactivity. This study highlights heterogeneity in children's responses to parental socialization and suggest that neural indices of emotional reactivity may help explain differential vulnerability. Findings also underscore a unique paternal role in early emotional adjustment.