Examination of emotion regulation in the family context: A mixed method study from Turkey

Individuals use different strategies dealing with their negative emotions and these strategies are associated with various adjustment outcomes. In the family context, parental emotion regulation strategies are also linked to the children's emotion regulation. One aim of the current study was to examine the type of emotion regulation strategies used by parents in the Turkish cultural context. Another aim was to exploratorily investigate whether parents' emotion regulation processes emerge in a way that predicts their children's emotion dysregulation. One hundred seven families that had a child attending primary school participated in this study. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the parents at their homes. Child emotion dysregulation was also measured with the Emotion Regulation Checklist. Based on content analysis, the findings revealed four main themes showing a converging pattern among parents, namely non-confrontation, proactive strategies, metacognitive strategies, and dysregulated expression. In the subsequent quantitative part of the study, parental adaptiveness scores for emotion regulation strategies were calculated to examine relationships with children's emotion dysregulation. The findings of separate hierarchical regression analyses for mothers and fathers indicated that the maternal, but not paternal, adaptiveness level in emotion regulation significantly predicted the child's emotion dysregulation after controlling for parental education and the child's age and gender. These qualitative and quantitative findings could contribute to the literature by drawing a comprehensive picture of emotion regulation in the family context in Turkey.