Infant Emotion Regulation with Mothers and Fathers: The Roles of Infant Temperament and Parent Psychopathology

The ability to regulate emotions is a key part of infants’ social and emotional development, but this ability may differ due to different factors internal and external to the infant. The current study examined the association between infant temperament and parent psychopathology to predict emotion regulation strategies in a sample of 4-montholds using the diathesis-stress model (Monroe & Simons, 1991). Parent-report questionnaires were used to measure infant temperament (the Infant-Behavior Questionnaire-Revised, IBQ-R; Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003) and parental psychopathology (Inventory of Depression and Anxiety, IDAS; Watson et al., 2007). Infants’ use of parent-focused, attentional distraction, and self-soothing strategies were rated during a dyadic face-to-face play task with mothers and fathers (Still-Face Paradigm, Tronick, Als, Adamson, Wise, & Brazelton, 1978) to assess emotion regulation strategy use. Multiple regression analyses revealed significant effects for mother-infant dyads that partially supports the diathesis-stress model