| Summary: | The goals of the present study were: 1) to describe and provide initial support for the validity of the Future Scenarios Questionnaire (FSQ), a new self-report questionnaire designed to measure parental responding to anticipated children’s negative emotions; and 2) to examine how maternal responses on the FSQ related to young children’s aggressive, asocial, and prosocial behaviors with peers. Further, this study examined whether the temperamental trait of negative affect moderated the relation between maternal responses on the FSQ and children’s social adjustment outcomes. Participants were 92 mothers of preschool-age children (43 boys and 49 girls; M age 61.5 months). Mothers provided ratings on the FSQ and child temperament ratings on the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart, Ahadi, & Hershey, 1994). They also completed a range of measures which were included to assess the construct validity of the FSQ. These included measures of attachment representations, maternal mind-mindedness, perceived control, and alexithymia. Sixty-nine teachers provided ratings on the Child Behavior Scale (CBS; Ladd & Profilet, 1996) for children’s aggressive, asocial, and prosocial behaviors in the peer context.
Factor analysis of the FSQ revealed two subscales: Encourage Emotion Expression (EEE) and Discourage Emotion Expression (DEE). Patterns of correlations among these subscales and the additional mother measures suggested that the FSQ demonstrates some construct validity. Further, the results of the moderation analyses showed that maternal responding on the FSQ interacts with negative affect in the prediction of child behaviors, however not in the hypothesized ways. In particular, encouraging emotion expression significantly predicted more asocial behavior and less prosocial behavior (approached significance), but only for children rated high in negative affect. Similarly, discouraging emotion expression significantly predicted less aggressive behavior only for high negative affect children. None of these relations was significant for children rated low in negative affect. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the importance of considering child temperament in emotion socialization processes.
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