Associations Between Parent and Child Negative Emotionality and Parenting

Geel, Lilia G.

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Associations Between Parent and Child Negative Emotionality and Parenting Public Deposited

Analytics

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/2r36v028q

Abstract

Negative emotionality is associated with psychopathology, such as mood and eating disorders, as
well as other negative outcomes such as emotion dysregulation and psychological inflexibility.
Thus, an improved understanding of the etiology of negative emotionality, specifically in
childhood and adolescence, may inform the development of interventions designed to increase
emotional stability in children. The present study uses an adoption design to address whether
similarity in parents’ and children’s negative emotionality is due to genetic influences,
environmental influences, or both, and whether negative or warm parenting mediates this
association. This study examined longitudinal data from participants in the Colorado Adoption
Study, including 637 adoptive and 783 non-adoptive parents, 331 adoptees, and 512 non
adoptees. We evaluated whether associations between parents’ and children’s negative
emotionality are consistent with environmental mediation or passive gene–environment
correlation (passive rGE) and examined evidence for evocative gene–environment correlation
(evocative rGE). Our results indicated that passive rGE may play a role in the association
between parents’ and children’s negative emotionality, and there is some evidence that parents’
negative emotionality influences children’s negative emotionality via negative parenting.
Specifically, negative parenting partially mediated the association between biological mothers’
negative emotionality and children’s negative emotionality, but no mediation was found for
biological fathers. Additionally, our results showed no evidence for evocative rGE, as both
genetically related and genetically unrelated sibling pairs were treated similarly for warm and
negative parenting conditions. Our findings suggest the importance for future studies to consider
how gene–environment correlations may influence the results, especially when they lack a
genetically informed design.

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