Parents’ expressed emotions and children’s executive functions

The ways in which people talk about their family members may say as much as the words themselves. For example, emotions expressed by family members of mentally ill patients during unscripted speech samples relate to the risk of relapse and the prognosis of psychiatric disorders; however, the idea of expressed emotions as a construct has previously been limited to parents of children and adolescents aged 4–18 years who suffer from severe emotional or behavior dysregulation. Here, we applied an expressed emotions coding paradigm to speech samples obtained from mothers and fathers of 104 typically developing children when the children were 14 months of age. This is the first study applying the expressed emotions coding paradigm at this age. Parents were prompted to give thoughts, attitudes, and feelings about their children; speech samples were coded for critical comments (e.g., "She is very whiny"), emotional over-involvement (e.g., "I was so worried, I couldn't sleep"), and quality of relationship (e.g., "We get along great"). During the same home visit, children completed three executive function tasks that measured children's inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. We found negative associations between fathers' criticism and their children's inhibition and between fathers' emotional over-involvement and their children's working memory. In contrast, we found positive associations between mothers' expressed quality of relationship and their children's working memory. This approach to analyzing parents' speech samples may allow for unique insights into the thoughts, attitudes, and feelings of new parents and how that might guide children's development.