Children who Perceive Greater Parental Sadness and Anger are More Depressed

TITLE: Children who Perceive Greater Parental Sadness and Anger are More Depressed

AUTHORS: Diana Beaubrun, Lexi Smith, Ashley Hunter, B.S., & Erin McDonald, B.A.

FACULTY SPONSOR: Dr. Erin Tully, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology 

Introduction: Emotional development occurs when basic emotions and developed cognitive systems interact to form complex emotion schemas (Buss et al., 2019). An important aspect of children's healthy emotional development is parental socialization of reading emotional cues, like facial expression (Eisenberg et al., 1998).

Purpose: Our previous research suggests that children’s perceptions of poorer parent-child relationship quality were associated with higher levels of children’s depression. To our knowledge, no study has examined how children's perceptions of parents' emotional intensities are related to children's depression. The current study tested the hypothesis that children who perceive that their parent’s express greater intensities of negative emotions (sadness, anger) and lower levels of happiness will have higher levels of self- and parent-reported depression. 

Method: Children (N= 91; 49% female; Mage= 5.5, SD= .70) watched their parents display sadness, anger and happiness during a stimulated phone call wherein all parents displayed the same emotions for a fixed duration of time and said the same emotional statements. Children rated the intensity of their parents’ emotions and completed a self-report behavioral rating scale of their own depression. Parents completed ratings of their child's depression. Linear regressions, controlling for age, gender and ratings of their parents’ emotions, were used to test our hypothesis.

Results: As predicted, children who rated higher intensities of parents' sadness (B= 1.290, p=.002), and anger (B= .841, p=.012) had higher levels of self-reported depression. Contrary to the hypothesis, ratings of happiness (B= .512, p= .100) were not associated with child's self-reported depression. Also, children's ratings of intensities of parents’ sadness, (B=.227, p=.175), anger (B=-.082, p=.576), and happiness (B=-.037, p=.791) were not associated with parents' reports of their child's depression.

Conclusion: Our findings suggest that depressed children as young as five years old are sensitive to their parents’ sadness and anger intensities. Children who are experiencing depression may already demonstrate biased thinking, that is characteristic of depression later in development. Our findings also highlight the potential utility of child report depression, even in young children.

Recommendations:  Next steps are to study other cognitive biases in young children and associations between early biases and later depression.