The strategies parents use when responding to their child’s emotions, particularly negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness, have been shown to be associated with distress later in life. In addition, both supportive and non-supportive strategies, have been correlated with emotional development, particularly emotion recognition and emotion regulation. These processes comprise emotional intelligence, which has been linked to psychological distress. Much of the research in this area has been done with children, predominantly preschoolers, and as such, research is needed with older populations, particularly emerging adults (ages 18 to 29), who are within a developmental period where psychological distress is more prevalent. As such, the current study asked emerging adults (N = 497) to retrospectively examine the way their parents responded to their negative emotions, and assessed current symptoms related to psychological distress, as well as emotional intelligence (i.e., emotion recognition and emotion regulation). Path analyses were conducted using PROCESS (Hayes, 2013) to explore two parallel mediation models in which emotion recognition and emotion regulation mediated the association between both supportive socialization strategies and non-supportive socialization strategies and psychological distress. The current results support a partial mediation between emotion socialization and distress through emotion recognition and emotion regulation. Importance is derived from the novelty of the study, evidence for the conceptual model, and intervention implications for clinicians with clients. Limitations and future directions are discussed
