(PS10-B41) Adverse Childhood Experiences Are Associated with Caregivers’ Validating and Invalidating Responses to Children’s Emotions

Exposure to adverse childhood experiences is associated with a wide range of poor mental health outcomes in adults (Jones et al., 2018). One mechanism thought to link exposure to ACEs with negative outcomes is emotion dysregulation (Cloitre et al., 2019), a common consequence of childhood adversity. Research suggests that individuals’ emotional functioning can be impacted by their caregivers’ methods of emotion socialization, including caregivers’ validating and invalidating reactions to the child’s emotion (Eisenberg et al., 1998). However, no research to date has examined whether ACEs have direct relationships to early emotion socialization experiences.

Participants were 122 undergraduate students (M_age = 20.16 years, SD = 1.45) enrolled in an introductory psychology course at a North American university who completed a series of online self-report questionnaires for course credit. The sample was 54.1% female, 44.3% male, and 1.6% nonbinary, and diverse in in terms of race and ethnicity (e.g., 47.5% Asian, 31.1% White, 15.6% Latinx, 7.4% Black). Participants completed the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Questionnaire (Felitti et al., 1998) and the Socialization of Emotions Scale (SES; Krause et al., 2003), a measure of early emotion socialization by caregivers. The SES contains three subscales for supportive/validating responses from caregivers to children (soothing children, problem-solving, encouraging them to express their emotions) and three subscales for unsupportive/invalidating responses (directing distress toward children, minimizing their emotion, punishing them).

An exploratory factor analysis of the ten ACE questionnaire items identified three factors (Abuse/Mental Illness Exposure, Substance Use/Incarceration Exposure, Household Dysfunction) that explained 53.3% of the variance in responses. To examine relations among ACE factors and SES subscales, ACE factors were regressed onto subscales of the SES. Abuse/Mental Illness Exposure was positively associated with distress reactions (𝛽 = .318, p < .001), minimization (𝛽 = .301, p = .001), and punitive reactions (𝛽 = .320, p < .001) from caregivers, and negatively associated with problem-focused reactions (𝛽 = -.286, p = .001), emotion-focused reactions (𝛽 = -.245, p = .005), and emotional expression encouragement (𝛽 = -.370, p < .001). Substance Use/Incarceration Exposure was positively associated with punitive reactions only (𝛽 = -.198, p = .021), while Household Dysfunction was positively associated with distress reactions (𝛽 = .258, p = .003) and minimization (𝛽 = .201, p = .023), and negatively associated with problem-focused reactions (𝛽 = -.303, p = .001), and emotion-focused reactions (𝛽 = -.320, p < .001).


Findings strongly suggest that stress and adversity within a family—including abuse, neglect, substance use, incarceration, and household dysfunction—is associated with caregivers’ ability to respond to children’s emotions in validating and supportive ways and should be considered in efforts to mitigate adverse childhood experiences. Future studies should examine whether emotion socialization is a potential mechanism through which exposure to ACEs impacts adult mental health outcomes.