Early adversity and children's emotion regulation: Differential roles of parent emotion regulation and adversity exposure

Exposure to early life adversity (ELA) is associated with increased rates of psychopathology and poor physical health. The present study builds on foundational work by Megan Gunnar identifying how ELA results in poor long-term outcomes through alterations in the stress response system, leading to major disruptions in emotional and behavioral regulation. Specifically, the present study tested the direct effects of ELA against the role of parent socialization to shed light on the mechanisms by which ELA leads to emotion regulation deficits. Children ages 4–7 years (N = 64) completed interviews about their experiences of deprivation and threat, a fear conditioning and extinction paradigm, and an IQ test. Parents of the children completed questionnaires regarding their own emotion regulation difficulties and psychopathology, their children's emotion regulation, and child exposure to adversity. At the bivariate level, greater exposure to threat and parental difficulties with emotion regulation were associated with poorer emotion regulation in children, assessed both via parental report and physiologically. In models where parental difficulties with emotion regulation, threat, and deprivation were introduced simultaneously, regression results indicated that parental difficulties with emotion regulation, but not deprivation or threat, continued to predict children's emotion regulation abilities. These results suggest that parental socialization of emotion is a robust predictor of emotion regulation tendencies in children exposed to early adversity.

Parent Support of Mexican-Descent High School Adolescents’ Science Education: A Culturally Grounded Framework

The aim of this study was to use sociocultural perspectives to elaborate on Eccles’ parent socialization model and create a culturally grounded, multidimensional model of parent support among Mexican-descent families. Given Latinx underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers, we focus on science as an important domain in which to study parent support. Using a qualitative approach, this study examines (a) what forms of parent science support do Mexican-descent parents and adolescents perceive as best practices and (b) what are the social, cultural, and contextual barriers parents face and in what ways do parents continue to support their adolescents in science in spite of those barriers? Seventy-four parent (mean age: 40 years; 23% U.S.-born and 77% Mexico-born) and 73 adolescent (mean age: 15 years; 41% female) nterviews were analyzed using inductive and deductive approaches. Findings suggest that parents use traditional and nontraditional culturally grounded forms of support: involvement at home, providing words of encouragement (e.g., échale ganas), and leveraging resources (e.g., kin support). Participants felt work-related barriers, linguistic barriers, and limited science knowledge shaped parents’ support. Results highlight the unique ways parents support their adolescents’ science education as well as the need for educators to consider how parents’ sociocultural experiences shape their support.

The Accuracy and Value of Voter Validation in National Surveys: Insights from Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Studies

Ansolabehere and Hersh and others have examined the reported voting behavior of survey respondents using a variety of validation methods, including matching with national voter files provided by outside vendors. This analysis provides the first examination of a thirty-year national longitudinal study and compares the insights obtained from this longitudinal analysis to two 2016 national cross-sectional studies of voting behavior using structural equation modeling. We find that respondents of the longitudinal study overreport at lower rates than respondents in our 2016 samples, and the traditional predictors of overreporting such as political interest, engagement, and partisanship predict overreporting among respondents in both our longitudinal and 2016 short-term panel studies, but our longitudinal data include novel predictors of overreporting such as parent socialization factors. We conclude with a discussion of the phenomenon of overreporting in surveys and how survey accuracy becomes increasingly important for both the public and policymakers in an era of decreasing trust in institutions and expertise.