Relations between Parenting, Family Context, and Emotion Regulation in the Development of Psychopathology in Young Maltreated Children

Emotion regulation has been recognized as a fundamental process in early socioemotional development; however, investigation into the relations between parenting styles, practices, and emotion regulation in maltreating families has been severely lacking in the literature. The current study observationally examined the relations between specific parenting practices, parenting styles, and maltreated children\u27s emotion regulation examining the same child with both a maltreating and non-maltreating caregiver. The findings of this study indicate that parenting practices within both maltreating and non-maltreating caregivers affect child emotion regulation and emotionality. Positive, supportive parenting increases child effortful control and positive affect while decreasing anger. Alternately, negative, controlling parenting increases child anger and decreases effortful control and positive affect. Furthermore, a harsh, controlling parenting style along with negative parenting practices increases child negativity among maltreating dyads, whereas, with non-maltreating caregivers, positive parenting practices are more related to positive emotionality in children within a warm and supportive emotional climate. Across maltreating and non-maltreating caregivers, findings indicated that positive parenting behaviors combined with a warm parenting style increase emotional regulation in maltreated children. Taken together the findings of this study indicated that the family emotional climate, including factors such as parental warmth and hostility, marital satisfaction, and social support, can affect the relations between maltreatment, parenting, and child emotional regulation and may even mitigate the negative effects on adjustment. Intervention and prevention work aimed at increasing maltreated children’s emotional regulation abilities should build strengths within families by teaching positive parenting behaviors and working to create a warmer, more supportive family emotional climate as early in development as possible

Relations between Parenting, Family Context, and Emotion Regulation in the Development of Psychopathology in Young Maltreated Children

Emotion regulation has been recognized as a fundamental process in early socioemotional development; however, investigation into the relations between parenting styles, practices, and emotion regulation in maltreating families has been severely lacking in the literature. The current study observationally examined the relations between specific parenting practices, parenting styles, and maltreated children\u27s emotion regulation examining the same child with both a maltreating and non-maltreating caregiver. The findings of this study indicate that parenting practices within both maltreating and non-maltreating caregivers affect child emotion regulation and emotionality. Positive, supportive parenting increases child effortful control and positive affect while decreasing anger. Alternately, negative, controlling parenting increases child anger and decreases effortful control and positive affect. Furthermore, a harsh, controlling parenting style along with negative parenting practices increases child negativity among maltreating dyads, whereas, with non-maltreating caregivers, positive parenting practices are more related to positive emotionality in children within a warm and supportive emotional climate. Across maltreating and non-maltreating caregivers, findings indicated that positive parenting behaviors combined with a warm parenting style increase emotional regulation in maltreated children. Taken together the findings of this study indicated that the family emotional climate, including factors such as parental warmth and hostility, marital satisfaction, and social support, can affect the relations between maltreatment, parenting, and child emotional regulation and may even mitigate the negative effects on adjustment. Intervention and prevention work aimed at increasing maltreated children’s emotional regulation abilities should build strengths within families by teaching positive parenting behaviors and working to create a warmer, more supportive family emotional climate as early in development as possible

Processing of nonverbal vocalisations in dementia

Nonverbal emotional vocalisations are fundamental communicative signals used to convey a diverse repertoire of social and emotional information. They transcend the boundaries of language and cultural specificity that hamper many neuropsychological tests, making them ideal candidates for understanding impaired socio-emotional signal processing in dementia. Symptoms related to changes in social behaviour and emotional responsiveness are poorly understood yet have significant impact on patients with dementia and those who care for them. In this thesis, I investigated processing of nonverbal emotional vocalisations in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a disease spectrum encompassing three canonical syndromes characterised by marked socio-emotional and communication difficulties - behavioural variant FTD (bvFTD), semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and nonfluent/agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA). I demonstrated distinct profiles of impairment in identifying three salient vocalisations (laughter, crying and screaming) and the emotions they convey. All three FTD syndromes showed impairments, with the most marked deficits of emotion categorisation seen in the bvFTD group. Voxel-based morphometry was used to define critical brain substrates for processing vocalisations, identifying correlates of vocal sound processing with auditory perceptual regions (superior temporal sulcus and posterior insula) and emotion identification with limbic and medial frontal regions. The second half of this thesis focused on the more fine-grained distinction of laughter subtypes. I studied cognitive (labelling), affective (valence) and autonomic (pupillometric) processing of laughter subtypes representing dimensions of valence (mirthful versus hostile) and arousal (spontaneous versus posed). Again, FTD groups showed greatest impairment with profiles suggestive of primary perceptual deficits in nfvPPA, cognitive overgeneralisation in svPPA and disordered reward and hedonic valuation in bvFTD. Neuroanatomical correlates of explicit laughter identification included inferior frontal and cingulo-insular cortices whilst implicit processing (indexed as autonomic arousal) was particularly impaired in those conditions associated with insular compromise (nfvPPA and bvFTD). These findings demonstrate the potential of nonverbal emotional vocalisations as a probe of neural mechanisms underpinning socio-emotional dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases

Models and analysis of vocal emissions for biomedical applications

This book of Proceedings collects the papers presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications, MAVEBA 2003, held 10-12 December 2003, Firenze, Italy. The workshop is organised every two years, and aims to stimulate contacts between specialists active in research and industrial developments, in the area of voice analysis for biomedical applications. The scope of the Workshop includes all aspects of voice modelling and analysis, ranging from fundamental research to all kinds of biomedical applications and related established and advanced technologies