Parental negative emotionality and emotional reactions to child’s crying: the mediating role of child’s temperament

ABSTRACT

Child’s crying is the stimuli serving the development of a child–parent relationship through evoking child-oriented and parent-oriented parental reactions. Individual differences in parental reactions to crying have been partly explained by parental and child’s temperament. We conducted two studies to verify the predicting effects of temperamental emotionality of parents and children on mothers’ (Study 1 and 2) and fathers’ (Study 2) self-reported emotional reactions to own child crying. In the Study 1 (N = 108), maternal ratings of the child’s global level of emotional reactivity and regulation partially mediated the relationship between mother’s emotional reactivity and parent-oriented reactions to the child crying. This result was confirmed in the Study 2 (N = 270) with maternal general negative affect and child’s negative emotionality as predictors. Additionally, in the Study 2, child’s temperamental negative emotionality fully mediated the relationship between the father’s negative affect and parent-oriented emotional reactions to the child’s crying.

KEYWORDS:

• Crying
• mother-child relations
• father-child relations
• temperament
• emotionality

Acknowledgement

Authors would like to thank Magdalena Lemiesz for collecting data in the study 1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland under grant number 2016/22/E/HS6/00237 awarded to Maria Kaźmierczak.

Notes on contributors

Maria Kaźmierczak

Maria Kaźmierczak, PhD, an Associate Professor and the Head of Department of Family Studies and Quality of Life at the Institute of Psychology, University of Gdansk in Poland. Her specialty is family psychology and psychology of individual differences. Her research focuses on empathy, couple and family processes, and transitions to motherhood and fatherhood.

Paulina Pawlicka

Paulina Pawlicka, PhD, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Gender Psychology at the Institute of Psychology, University of Gdansk in Poland. Her research interest focuses on child development psychology, perinatal psychology (including birth satisfaction and the importance of labour and birth experience for parental sensitivity and self-efficacy) and factors important for development of resilience in infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

Paulina Anikiej

Paulina Anikiej, M.S., a research assistant at the Psychological Counseling Center for Rare Genetic Diseases, Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Gdansk in Poland. Psychologist with a specialty in neurobiopsychology. Currently, during doctoral studies in Psychology. Her research interests focus on parental responsiveness, family relationships and psychological assessment of the child.

Ariadna Łada

Ariadna Łada, M.S., a research assistant at the Department of Developmental Psychology and Psychopathology, Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Gdansk in Poland. Psychologist with a specialty in neurobiopsychology. Currently, during doctoral studies in Psychology. Her research interests focus on maturity to parenthood, fatherhood, parental attitudes as well as clinical child psychology and neuropsychology.

Justyna Michałek-Kwiecień

Justyna Michałek-Kwiecień, PhD, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Family Studies and Quality of Life at the Institute of Psychology, University of Gdansk in Poland. Specialist in a field of personal identity development in the context of family relations, adaptation to parenthood and human development.