Intergenerational emotion dysregulation transmission in mother–child dyads: Transactions across infancy and toddlerhood.

Intergenerational transmission of emotion dysregulation (ED) has strong implications for psychopathology risk. Past research has neglected assessing parenting-specific domains of ED and the transactional nature of these processes in early development. This study tested longitudinal relations among mothers' nonacceptance of their own emotions (ED), mothers' experiential avoidance of their child's emotions (EA), and early manifestations of child ED (negative affect [NA]). Participants were 186 mothers (91.9% White, 95.7% non-Hispanic/Latina) of children (44.6% female, 83.3% White, 93% non-Hispanic/Latinx, diverse socioeconomic status) who participated when children were ages 1 (T1), 2 (T2), and 3 (T3) years. Mothers reported on variables of interest at each time point. A random intercept cross-lagged panel model delineated within- versus between-family effects among variables across time, allowing for a variable-centered examination of both individual differences and bidirectional effects. Regarding the between-family component, ED positively covaried with both EA and NA such that mothers endorsing higher nonacceptance of their emotions tended to also endorse their child's greater NA and greater avoidance of child emotions. Though within-family autoregressive relations trended positively, no stability effects emerged. Within-time point and cross-lagged effects tended to be nonsignificant, with the exception of EA and NA positively covarying at T3, such that when mothers had more stability (less fluctuation) in their EA at child age 3, they also endorsed more stability in their child's NA. Findings also prospectively indicated greater trait-like stability in the maternal versus child emotion traits and in between-family relations relative to within-family processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).