Emotional suppression has negative consequences for children | WSU Insider

By Scott Weybright, College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resources Sciences

"Not in front of children." It is a long-standing advocacy that parents avoid showing strong conflict and negative emotions towards their children.

But a new study by a scientist at Washington State University in Vancouver disagrees and shows that it is better to express negative emotions in a healthy way than to destroy them.

Sara Waters, an assistant professor in the human development department at the WSU campus in Vancouver, and co-authors at the University of California at Berkley and the University of California at San Francisco, describe their findings in the journal Emotion.

"We wanted to see how we suppress emotions and how that changes the way parents and children interact," said Waters. "Children are resorting to suppression, but many parents think it's a good thing to do."

The study was conducted on 109 mothers or fathers with their children in San Francisco. The sample was divided almost equally between mothers and fathers, with scientists wanting to know if there were differences in the results between the sexes.

First, the researchers gave the parent a stressful task: speaking in public with negative comments from the audience. Then the parents had an activity to complete with their children, some having been asked to remove their emotions at random. Others have been told to act naturally.

The activity was the same for all couples, working together to assemble a Lego project. However, children aged 7 to 11 received instructions on paper, but were not allowed to touch the Legos. The parents had to assemble the project but could not consult the instructions. This forced them to work closely together to succeed.

"We are interested in behaviors," said Waters. "We looked at the responsiveness, the warmth, the quality of the interactions and how the parent guided the child."

Waters and his co-authors had a team of WSU Vancouver undergraduate research assistants looking at the 109 interaction videos to mark every occasion for warmth, advice and other emotions.

The parent and the child have also been connected to various sensors to measure heart rate, stress level, etc. The authors of the study combined this data with the coding done by the assistants to obtain their results.

"Trying to remove their stress has made parents less positive partners during the Lego task," Waters said. "They were less guided, but it was not just the parents who responded. These children were less receptive and positive towards their parents. It's almost as if the parents were transmitting these emotions. "

Gender differences

Since the team has made such an effort to get an equal share of father / mother, she has been able to make other discoveries. It turns out that emotional suppression has made children more sensitive to their mothers. The children's responses changed less when a father suppressed his emotions, Waters said.

For the moment, there is not enough data on fathers and their children in emotion studies to explain why.

"We just do not have a lot of research on fathers, because it's very difficult to get them involved in research projects," said Waters. "It took a lot of work to have enough fathers in this study."

In previous research, it has been found that in general, men are more likely to suppress their emotions. Waters suspects that it is possible for a father repressing his emotions to be unusual, so he did not have as much impact on the children in this study.

Children pick up emotional residues

Waters said that there are dozens of studies that show kids are able to recover the "emotional residue" from their parents.

"Children are good at picking up subtle signals of emotion," she said. "If they feel that something bad has happened and parents are acting normally and not caring for it, it's confusing for them." These are two contradictory messages sent. "

Instead of suppressing emotions in front of her children, Waters suggests that the best course of action is to allow kids to see a healthy conflict from start to resolution.

"Let them see the whole trajectory," she said. "It helps kids learn to regulate their own emotions and solve their problems. They see that the problems can be solved. It is best to let the children know that you are feeling angry and tell them what you are going to do to improve the situation. "

This research was funded by NIMH (T32MH019391), NSF (BCS 1430799), the Amini Foundation for the Study of Conditions and a NSF Graduate Fellowship.