ERP Lab for Developmental Studies

Parents are often required to manage their children’s negative emotions. Some of the emotion socialization practices that parents exert in these situations are considered to be non-supportive (e.g., punitive and/or dismissing responses) and have been linked to greater socioemotional difficulties of their children. While previous studies suggest that parental temperamental tendencies may underlie these non-supportive responses, the exploration of such a mechanism remains limited. This study aimed to test the moderation between reactivity and self-regulation at the brain activity level, for explaining non-supportive emotion socialization practices of mothers. Participants included 161 mothers of kindergarten-aged children. The non-supportive parenting practices factor was extracted based on self-reports, and reactivity (i.e., frontal alpha asymmetry) and self-regulation (i.e., NoGo N2 amplitude) were extracted from EEG recordings. The analyses revealed that for mothers with withdrawal reactive tendency, their self-regulation was not related to their use of non-supportive parenting practices, and was generally lower than average. However, for mothers with approach reactive tendency, the more resources of self-regulation they had, the less they reported they used non-supportive parenting practices.