Date of Award

2005

Publication Type

Doctoral Thesis

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Psychology

Keywords

Psychology, Clinical.

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

This investigation provides preliminary evidence for the relative contribution of parent and child characteristics to emotional competence in siblings. A sample of 96 families with at least two children between 6 and 12 years of age participated. The participating parents completed measures of parenting attributes, child personality, and child's ability to regulate emotions for each participating child. At the same time, the children's language ability was evaluated and they were interviewed regarding their understanding of emotion. Preliminary analyses revealed that parental report of emotion regulation ability was not significantly correlated with emotion understanding scores for either younger or older siblings. A primary goal was to compare sibling's performance on measures associated with emotional competence. Consistent with previous research, siblings were similar in language ability, and differed in scores on measures of personality. Parents reported similarity in parenting attributes directed toward each sibling. Sibling scores on both measures associated with emotional competence (emotion regulation and emotion understanding) were similar. A second goal was to evaluate the contribution of parent and child characteristics to emotional competence between families. Although many of the predictor variables were correlated with emotion regulation, only three aspects of personality (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) made a unique contribution to the variance associated with the emotion regulation scores. Age was the only variable identified as making a unique contribution to the variance between emotion understanding scores. A third goal was to evaluate the extent to which differential familial characteristics explained variance in emotional competence. The variables that made unique contributions toward predicting differences between siblings in positive emotion regulation were parental autonomy, plus child agreeableness and conscientiousness. Further analyses revealed that siblings who differed the most on personality variables (agreeableness or conscientiousness), and differed the most in parental autonomy accorded to them, also differed the most in emotion regulation ability. Siblings who were most similar in emotion regulation ability were also most similar in personality but were only moderately similar in autonomy accorded to them. With emotion understanding as the criterion, age was the only variable that accounted for a significant proportion of the variance.Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .L44. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-11, Section: B, page: 6279. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005.

Download

Share

COinS