Patterns of parental responses to child negative emotions and children’s emotional adjustment in Chinese families: A latent profile analysis with multimethods.

Parental response to child negative emotions is an emblematic form of parental emotion socialization, having important implications for child emotional adjustment. Prior literature has predominantly been conducted with a variable-centered approach, which insufficiently captured the potentially intricate combination patterns of multiple emotion-related practices that parents naturally utilize. Building upon the cultural perspective of emotion socialization, the present study utilized a person-centered approach to identify patterns of parental responses to child negative emotions among Chinese parents and examined the associations between different response patterns and child emotional adjustment. One hundred fifty children (M_age = 8.54 years, SD = 1.67; 42.0% girls) and their primary caregivers (M_age = 39.22 years, SD = 4.07; 82.7% mothers) participated in the present study. Parents reported their responses to child negative emotions via questionnaires. Child emotional adjustment was assessed via multiple methods: questionnaires reported by multiple informants, behavioral coding, and physiological assessments. Latent profile analysis identified three patterns of parental responses to child negative emotions: "supportive" (high supportive and low unsupportive responses, 39.19%), "strict" (moderate supportive and moderate unsupportive responses, characterized by relatively high minimization and relatively low expressive encouragement, 27.70%), and "ambivalent" (high supportive and relatively high unsupportive responses, 33.11%). Children with "supportive" parents exhibited the best emotional adjustment, whereas children with "strict" parents exhibited the worst emotional adjustment. Children with "ambivalent" parents showed generally adaptive emotional adjustment but were also characterized by low self-esteem and high emotion negativity. Our findings were further discussed in relation to the modern Chinese culture. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).