Expressed emotion in children: associations with sibling relationships

Examining the Relationship Between Children's ADHD Symptomatology and Inadequate Parenting: The Role of Household Chaos

OBJECTIVE

This study examines the interrelations of parenting practices, emotional climate, and household chaos in families with children with and without ADHD. In particular, indirect pathways from children's ADHD symptomatology to inadequate parenting and negative emotional climate via household chaos were investigated.

METHOD

Parenting, emotional climate, and household chaos were assessed using questionnaires and a speech sample of parents of 31 children with and 53 without ADHD, aged 7 to 13 years.

RESULTS

Group differences were found for certain parenting dimensions, the parent-child relationship, critical comments, and household chaos. While we found significant indirect effects between children's ADHD and certain parenting dimensions through household chaos, no effects were found for any aspect of emotional climate.

CONCLUSION

Children's ADHD symptoms translate into inadequate parenting through household chaos, which underlines the need for interventions to improve household organization skills in parents of children with ADHD.

Mother-Adolescent Dialogues and Adolescents' Behavior Problems in a Multicultural Sample: The Mediating Role of Representations

This study examined whether the link between higher maternal sensitive guidance of emotional dialogues and fewer adolescent behavior problems is mediated by adolescents' more coherent representations of their mothers. The study also explored the consistency of this model across families from varied cultural backgrounds. Participants were 143 Jewish-Israeli mother-adolescent dyads from three cultural groups: immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, immigrants from Western countries, and native-born Israelis. Maternal sensitive guidance was observed during mother-adolescent dialogues about emotional experiences. Adolescents' representations were assessed via their narratives regarding their mother and their relationship. Examiners reported adolescents' behavior problems. Results indicated that across cultural groups adolescents' more coherent representations partially mediated the association between higher maternal sensitive guidance and fewer adolescent behavior problems.

The Maternal Emotional Climate Predicts Twin Sibling Relationship Quality

We investigated the association between maternal expressed emotion and twin relationship quality, after controlling for a maternal questionnaire measure of the mother-child relationship. This was explored within a community sample of 156 mothers and their two young twin children (M child age = 3.69 years; SD child age = 0.37). Mothers reported on the twin-twin relationship and the mother-child relationship via questionnaire. They were also interviewed about each child using the innovative Preschool Five Minute Speech Sample (Daley et al., 2003), which yields information about relative positive:negative maternal expressed emotion. Mothers who expressed more family-wide positive emotion and less family-wide negative emotion also reported more positivity, but not negativity, within the twin relationship - even when controlling for questionnaire reports of the mother-child relationship. Counter to expectations, discrepancies in mothers' expressed emotion between their twins also predicted more positive sibling relationships. Our findings corroborate the well established spill-over effect, whereby families are viewed as emotional units of interdependent individuals, none of whom can be understood in isolation from one another. Most importantly, the Preschool Five Minute Speech Sample provides information about mothering that questionnaire reports may not, and thus it is a useful tool in better understanding the twin family system.

Expressed emotion as an assessment of family environment with mothers and fathers of 1-year-old children

BACKGROUND

High levels of expressed emotion (EE) in parents have been found to put children at risk for emotional and behavioural problems. However, the majority of existing studies have focused on mothers of school-aged children and adolescents rather than younger children, and have only rarely included fathers.

METHODS

The present study examined the reliability of EE in mothers and fathers of 1-year old children. It also investigated whether depression and marital problems in the postnatal period predicted EE toward the child at 12 months. EE was assessed with the Preschool Five Minute Speech Sample in 163 families.

RESULTS

The rater-interrater and code-recode reliability was high for most EE dimensions. Mothers and fathers were found to display quite similar EE scores. Regression analyses showed that depression and couple relationship significantly predicted EE in mothers, but not fathers.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings suggest that EE provides a reliable and useful assessment of the family environment in families of young children.