“Assessing Parental Emotion Socialization and Child Adjustment Across Countries”

This study focuses on the validation of the Emotion as a Child Scale (EACS; Magai, 1996) to examine parental emotion socialization and its association with children’s adjustment. This study involved a sample of parents of 100 Colombian (Mage = 11.16, SD = 3.60; 52% girls) and 400 Italian (Mage = 13.33, SD = 3.76; 49% girls) children. After having consented, parents were invited to fill in a set of questionnaires online anonymously. Measures were administered in Italian and Spanish. Parents completed the EACS (Magai, 1996; Klimes- Dougan et al., 2007), referred to the parental responses to the expression of their children’s sadness and anger, the CBCL (Achenbach, 1991) to examine their children’s internalizing and externalizing problems, and school performance, the Prosocial Behavior Scale (Caprara & Pastorelli, 1993), and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed in both samples the existence of two factors, namely supportive socialization strategies (including reward and override-related items) and unsupportive socialization strategies (including punish, neglect, and magnify related items. Moreover, via multi-group path analysis, it emerged that in both countries the supportive socialization strategies were positively associated with children’s adjustment (i.e., high children’s school performance, prosocial behavior, and adaptive emotion regulation), whereas the unsupportive socialization strategies were positively associated with children’s maladjustment (i.e., high internalizing and externalizing problems).