Reflective functioning and empathy among mothers of school-aged children: Charting the space between.

Parental child-focused reflective functioning (RF)-understanding children's behavior as a function of mental states-and parental empathy-understanding, resonating with, and feeling concern for children's emotions-have each been linked to sensitive caregiving and children's attachment security in separate studies, but they have been neither directly compared nor have researchers tested whether they interact in predicting child outcomes. In this article, we offer theoretical perspectives regarding differences between the constructs, potential points of connection, and ways in which these constructs may function together. Then we test these ideas empirically with 2 samples of mothers of school-age children, exploring their unique and interactive associations with parenting sensitivity, children's attachment security, and children's emotion regulation. In Study 1, mothers (N = 105) watched their children completing a stressor task (i.e., an impossible puzzle); mothers then answered interview questions, from which separate teams coded state-like RF and empathy. In Study 2, mothers (N = 72) completed the Parent Development Interview, coded separately for trait-like parental RF and empathy. Results of the 2 studies converged, revealing moderate positive associations between parental RF and empathy. Further, both RF and empathy were positively associated with specific child outcomes (e.g., attachment security); also, there were unique patterns of association (e.g., parental empathy was uniquely associated with child physiological regulation [neuroendocrine reactivity]) and evidence that critical levels of both are important (e.g., for supportive parenting, accuracy of emotion judgment). Parental RF and empathy might be related to each other and to distinguishable capacities that contribute to attachment and related outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Mother-child language style matching predicts children's and mothers' emotion reactivity.

Co-regulation of behavior occurring within parent-child attachment relationships is thought to be the primary means through which children develop the capacity to regulate emotion, an ability that is protective across development. Existing research on parent-child co-regulation focuses predominantly on parent-infant dyads, and operationalizes co-regulation as the matching of facial expressions; however, matching can occur on other behaviors, including vocal tone, body movement, and language. Studies with young children find that greater matching is associated with children's lower emotion reactivity, but with unknown impacts on parents. In this study we examine a recently-developed metric of behavioral matching, language style matching (LSM), a composite measure of the similarity of function word use in spoken or written language between two or more people. We test whether LSM between mothers and their school-aged children is associated with children's and mothers' physiological and subjective emotion reactivity. Children completed a standardized stressor task while their mothers observed; children's and mother's cortisol and cardiovascular reactivity were assessed, as were their subjective reports of emotion reactivity. Following the stressor, children and mothers completed independent interviews about the experience, later assessed for LSM. Higher mother-child LSM was associated with lower emotion reactivity (lower cortisol reactivity, lower reports of negative emotion) for children, and with higher maternal cardiovascular but not cortisol or subjective reactivity. Further, higher LSM was more strongly associated with lower child cortisol reactivity when mothers were more reactive themselves. We conclude that mother-child LSM, thought to reflect a history of co-regulated interaction, confers protective benefits for children, but heightened reactivity for mothers.