(PS3-B42) Is It in the Family? Emotional Clarity and Attention Control Links Between Parents and Children

Intro:  Attentional control refers to the capacity to flexibly deploy and shift attention in a goal-directed manner and is one facet of executive function. Novel eye-tracking paradigms have shown delayed visual attentional withdrawal from sad faces and motivated disengagement from happy faces with internalizing problems (i.e. depression and anxiety). A reduced capacity to disengage attention as appropriate to context (attention control deficits) has been linked to maladaptive emotion regulation tendencies (a critical mechanism in the etiology and maintenance of many forms of psychopathology) i.e. emotional clarity (EC). EC is defined as the ability to identify different types of emotions and previous literature supports inflexible attentional control predicting deficits in EC. However, it remains unclear whether the previous relationship holds true if transmitted from parent to offspring. Employing a robust experience sampling methodology, the present study tested the contribution of both parent and child attentional control deficits in predicting their respective counterparts’ deficits in EC.  

Method: Thirty-eight parent-child dyads (adolescent: 46% Female, Mage=14.6, parent Mage=44.06) completed an eight-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) period in which their emotions regulation deployments, and emotional clarity were ascertained five times daily via a 5-point Likert scale. In tandem, and as part of a multi-method protocol, adolescents and parents were instructed to freely view facial expressions and shift their attention in response to a visual prompt. Attention disengagement indices reflect the speed with which participants shifted visual attention away from negatively valenced (sad) facial expressions to neutral faces. Multilevel models that employed restricted maximum likelihood estimation and person- and occasion-mean centering were employed to distinguish momentary and person-average emotional clarity. Demographic characteristics served as covariates where warranted.

Results: Results suggest that shorter periods of disengagement from sad faces, on the parents’ part relate to lower levels of emotional clarity among adolescents (b=-.305, p=.04). Conversely, adolescents who take longer to disengage from dysphoric information (sad faces) predict parents’ reports to be more clear about their emotions (b=.55, p=.05). Of note, neither parent nor child’s clarity related to their respective attentional control indices. 


Conclusion: The present findings speak to the notion that adolescent attentional control may be influenced by their parents ability to be emotionally clear, as may parental attentional control by their child’s emotional clarity. In other words, the results suggest that in children illustrating attention deficits, parents may present having higher emotional clarity when compared to parents of adolescents who do not illustrate similar attentional characteristics. The proposed relationship between clarity and attention may be reliant on parent-child relationships as opposed to being self-reliant. Clinical implications will be discussed.