Emotion-socialization and mental representations for caregivers: Significant-other representations in implicit and self-reported mood experience

This research was designed to integrate the literatures on adult emotion regulation and childhood emotion socialization by investigating how transient activation of a mental representation for a socializing caregiver affects adult emotional experience. The literature on childhood emotion socialization suggests that children who are exposed to critical or invalidating responses to their expressions of negative emotions are less effective at regulating emotions and use more avoidant emotion regulation strategies (see e.g., Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998), possibly consistent with adult emotion regulation styles such as repression or alexithymia. However, prior research has not investigated how adults' emotional reactions may be influenced by earlier emotion socialization---in terms of the way in which different demands for emotion regulation may be suggested by contextual and interpersonal cues relating to those earlier experiences. We hypothesized that, among people with a punitive emotion socialization history, exposure to a caregiver prime in a sadness-inducing context would enhance vigilance to additional negative affect cues and produce suppressed reports of negative emotion with heightened implicit negative affect.; In Study 1, we began examining these questions by developing a new measure, the Parental Reactions to Emotions Questionnaire. The results pointed to a strong relationship between adults' retrospective reports of their caregivers' punishing reactions toward their childhood expressions of sadness and those adults' current levels of depression and alexithymia. In Study 2, individuals were pre-selected based on scoring high or low on the punishing factor of the new measure and were then randomly assigned to one of four conditions---in which the relevant caregiver was or was not primed and in which a sad or neutral mood was induced. The results provided strong evidence for our hypothesis that facilitated vigilance to negative affect cues would be induced among participants with a punitive emotion socialization history when primed with their caregiver in the sad mood condition, as well as some evidence for our prediction that the same participants would show suppressed reports of negative mood. The results extend the literatures on the socialization of emotions, on emotion regulation, and on the role of significant-other representations in immediate personal response.