Are you feeling worried? Childhood anxiety: emotional competence and parent emotion socialisation

© 2015 Dr. Galit HasenResearch has begun to explore the emotional competence difficulties experienced by anxious children and associated parent emotion socialisation patterns. Particular patterns of emotional competence difficulties have been found to be associated with anxiety in middle childhood, however anxious preschool children’s emotional competencies have not yet been explored. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the emotional competence of anxious preschoolers and the associated parent emotion socialisation patterns. Study 1, a conceptual and theoretical study, investigated a community sample of 4 and 5-year-old children and found that higher anxiety was predicted by more intense negative emotions and poorer emotion regulation. The testing of a proposed theoretical model found that child anxiety was directly predicted by parent emotion socialisation, as well as indirectly predicted through child emotional competence pathways. A person-centred approach using cluster analysis found that preschool children with high anxiety were more likely to have families with more negative emotional expressiveness and who had parents who were more anxious and had poorer emotion regulation. On the other hand, parents who were emotionally attuned in their parenting, and had better emotion regulation skills had preschool children with the lowest levels of anxiety. Study 2 tested an emotion-focused parenting intervention as a universal and indicated prevention program. Results from the universal trial showed that an emotion-focused approach was helpful in reducing children’s anxiety difficulties, while results from the indicated trial found the program resulted in reductions in parents’ levels of anxiety. Study 3 involved an individually delivered treatment trial of this emotion-focused parenting program with parents of six highly anxious preschool children. Findings from Study 3 emphasise the importance of addressing parents’ meta-emotion philosophy (beliefs about emotions) in order to change parents’ responses to their anxious children. The overall contribution of these three studies was to provide support for teaching parents emotion-focused skills in responding to their children’s emotions and that these skills resulted in reducing children’s anxiety difficulties