Department of Psychology, Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA.
School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University, Kent Street, Bentley, Perth, WA, 6102, Australia.
Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol. 2022 Feb;50(2):133-148. doi: 10.1007/s10802-020-00759-9. Epub 2021 Jan 7.
Caregivers play a central role in promoting emotion regulation throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence. However, there are no existing psychometric measures to assess how parents assist children in employing emotion regulation strategies for negative emotions. We therefore developed the Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) Questionnaire to assess the degree to which parents assist their children in their use of ten different regulation strategies. In this paper, we describe the development of the PACER and examine its psychometric properties (N = 407 parents of children ages birth to 17 years). In so doing, we also use the PACER to comprehensively explore the links between parent-assisted emotion regulation and indices of parent and child stress, symptomatology, and attachment. Confirmatory factor analyses of the PACER items supported its intended ten-factor structure (corresponding to ten specific regulation strategies), which was invariant across different child age and sex categories. PACER scale scores had excellent internal consistency and generally acceptable test-retest reliability over a one-week period. Convergent validity was established via correlations between PACER scales and indices of parental emotion sensitivity, expressivity, and regulation, as well as parents' perception of the efficacy of their assistance with children's execution of emotion regulatory strategies. Lower parental facilitation of stereotypically adaptive emotion regulatory strategies was associated with higher child internalizing and externalizing problems and with poorer parent-child relationship quality. Overall, these findings suggest that the PACER may be a useful tool for the assessment of parental assistance with child emotion regulation across development.
照顾者在促进婴儿期、儿童期和青春期的情绪调节方面起着核心作用。然而，目前还没有评估父母如何帮助孩子运用情绪调节策略来应对负面情绪的心理测量学测量工具。因此，我们开发了《父母协助儿童情绪调节问卷》（PACER），以评估父母在多大程度上协助孩子运用十种不同的调节策略。在本文中，我们描述了 PACER 的开发过程，并检验了其心理测量学特性（N=407 名 0 至 17 岁儿童的父母）。在这样做的过程中，我们还使用 PACER 全面探讨了父母协助情绪调节与父母和儿童压力、症状和依恋的指标之间的关系。PACER 项目的验证性因素分析支持了其预期的 10 因素结构（对应于十种特定的调节策略），该结构在不同的儿童年龄和性别类别中是不变的。PACER 量表得分具有极好的内部一致性和在一周内的测试重测信度。通过 PACER 量表与父母情绪敏感性、表达性和调节性以及父母对其协助孩子执行情绪调节策略的效能感的指标之间的相关性，建立了聚合效度。父母对典型适应性情绪调节策略的促进作用较低与儿童内化和外化问题较高以及亲子关系质量较差有关。总的来说，这些发现表明，PACER 可能是评估父母在整个发展过程中协助儿童情绪调节的有用工具。
