Salley, Jenna

Children learn from their parents’ emotional expressions because one’s parents are the main source of social information, especially on an emotional level. Depression hinders the parents’ ability to express these emotions, in turn, hindering the child’s ability to identify and express emotions as they get older. Parents self-reported their everyday depressive symptoms and were placed into two depressive categories: high and low. By means of a story-telling paradigm, each parent read 2 stories to their child, one positively and one negatively valanced. This study looked at the parent-child dyadic interaction, as well as behavioral patterns of interactions in both children and parents. Parents’ depressive symptoms affected their ability to be expressive during emotionally valenced situations. Parent-child pairs also had less dyadic unity when depressive symptoms were prevalent. Depressive symptoms in the parent also led to the child expressing fewer relevant emotions and having lower comprehension of emotions. The findings suggest that depressive symptoms in the parents, even at a subclinical level, not only affect the parents’ emotional expressivity but also leads to weaker emotional processing skills in their preschoolers.