23-Oral Presentation - Jaewon Huh, Kevin Joseph, Arya Tamhane, Medha Vijayanand
Faculty Mentor: Scitech
Presentation Title: Emotion Socialization as a predictor of physiological and psychological response to stress
Abstract: Emotion socialization refers to the development of children’s responses to emotion based on parental upbringing. It is known to influence how children will respond to stressful situations in their adulthood. However, its effect on response to acute stress is unclear. This study aimed to explore the connections between parental emotion socialization and responses to stress while taking into account gender and race. The hypotheses of this study are that unsupportive parental responses would result in an increased negative physiological response and that gender and ethnicity will have an effect on this response. Parental emotion socialization strategies were found to be unrelated to overall physiological reactivity, but unsupportive parental response to children’s negative emotions was related to lower cortisol reactivity in females and African American participants, thus indicating physiological hypo-reactivity to stress. Parental responses to negative emotions did not predict heart rate or SBP reactivity to the stress in the current study. Overall, unsupportive parental responses lead to negative emotions in adulthood in females and African American youth, while supportive parental responses lead to lower negative emotions in adulthood in European American youth and males. Future experiments could address the stress levels across specific types of acute stressors. This is a student team presentation of work published by: Jinhong Guo, Sylvie Mrug, David C. Knight, Emotion socialization as a predictor of physiological and psychological responses to stress, Physiology & Behavior, Volume 175, 2017