父母害怕後設情緒理念之測量及對前青少年期兒童焦慮症狀之預測效果

Measurement of Parental Meta-emotion Philosophy about Fear and its Predictive Power for Anxiety Symptoms in Preadolescent Children

研究目的：父母對孩子情緒抱持的後設情緒理念與兒童適應密切關連，本研究目的為修編害怕版後設情緒理念量表及檢驗信、效度，探討母親害怕後設情緒理念對前青少年兒童焦慮症狀的預測效果。研究方法：以臺灣北部國小四至六年級普通班兒童及其父母為參與者。先修編害怕版父母後設情緒理念量表，以256位父母親填寫的量表資料檢驗因素結構及信度；以其中194對母親及兒童為對象，檢驗母親對兒童害怕的後設情緒理念類型，對間隔兩個月第二波兒童身體症狀、逃避傷害、社交焦慮、分離／恐慌焦慮症狀的預測效果。研究結果：害怕版後設情緒理念量表可萃取出教導型、摒除型及失控型三因素，並有良好內部一致性；母親害怕情緒後設情緒理念對兒童身體症狀具顯著解釋力，摒除型理念具顯著正向預測效果。研究結論：本研究編修害怕版後設情緒理念、檢驗用於前青少年期兒童父母之心理計量特徵，及害怕後設情緒理念與兒童焦慮症狀的關聯，有助於研究及實務工作者對父母害怕後設情緒理念的探討、測量及焦慮症狀病理機制的了解與介入。

Purpose: Meta-emotion philosophy refers to an individual’s cognitive evaluations and emotional responses toward emotion-related matters. Parents’ meta-emotion philosophy regarding their children’s emotions closely relates to their children’s internalizing symptoms. Research has primarily focused on parents’ meta-emotion philosophy regarding anger; fear is not as well understood. Fear is related to anxiety. Excessive fear in childhood is closely associated with anxiety disorders in adolescence, so we wanted to explore mothers’ metaemotion philosophy regarding their children’s fear. To do so, we revised the 24-item Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy Scale Short Form about Anger (which includes 4 types of metaemotion philosophies-emotion-coaching, noninvolvement, dismissing, and dysregulated) to develop a new version focused on fear, and then examined the reliability and validity of the revised measure. We next applied this measure to assess the predictive power of maternal meta-emotion philosophy about fear with respect to the anxiety symptoms of their preadolescent children. Methods: We adapted the wording of the original anger scale to reflect fear while attempting to preserve the characteristics of the original items. A total of 256 parents (194 mothers) of children in grades 4 to 6 in elementary schools in northern Taiwan completed the revised measure. We examined its factor structure with Confirmatory Factor Analysis and calculated each factor’s Cronbach’s α. Two months later, 256 children of these parents completed the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children, which measures physical symptoms, harm avoidance, social anxiety, and separation/panic. Using the data from the 194 mothers in the initial sample, we conducted a hierarchical regression analysis on the 194 pairs of mothers and their children to examine the predictive power of maternal meta-emotion philosophy about fear for children’s anxiety symptoms. Results:
Our factor analysis of the Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy Scale Short Form about Fear extracted 3 factors with good internal consistency: emotion-coaching, emotion-dismissing, and emotion-dysfunction. The items related to the emotion-noninvolvement did not form a factor, so we removed these 8 items. The hierarchical regression analysis indicated that maternal meta-emotion philosophy about fear as measured by 3 factors (16 items) significantly explained children’s physical symptoms, with emotion-dismissing philosophy showing a significant positive predictive effect. The other symptoms had no relation with the mother’s fear philosophy. Conclusions: We found that a mother’s meta-emotion philosophy about fear only relates to a child’s physical symptoms and not to harm avoidance, social anxiety, or separation/panic. It is unclear at this point whether our finding means that parental meta-emotion about fear really corresponds only to a child’s physical symptoms, or whether further development of the parental meta-emotion philosophy about fear measure is needed. Further research is needed to determine whether the emotion non-involvement dimension, which we excluded, would relate to any of the child’s anxiety symptoms. It is also important to examine the relation of fathers’ meta-emotion philosophy about fear to understand whether its role is the same or different from mothers’.