中華心理衛生協會

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' meta-emotion 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 meta-emotion 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'.