Early adolescents’ attachment security, parental emotion socialisation, and early adolescents’ emotion regulation of positive emotions

The attachment and emotion socialisation (ES) literatures both emphasise that how parents respond to and teach about emotions shapes children's emotion regulation (ER). Most studies, however, investigated these research traditions separately, focused on mothers' ES, and evaluated children's regulation of negative emotions. We evaluated whether, in mother-child and father-child relationships, attachment security and parental ES strategies of savouring or dampening children's positive emotions (PEs) differentially and uniquely relate to children's savouring or dampening strategies of regulating PEs, and the indirect effects of attachment security. Early adolescents (<i>N</i> = 112, boys = 55) completed an attachment interview, rated their ER of PEs (savouring and dampening), and rated their parents' ES of PEs (savouring and dampening). Children who were more securely attached to their mothers and fathers used more savouring and less dampening of their PEs. Mothers' and fathers' savouring or dampening of PEs was associated with children's greater use of the corresponding strategy. Parents' ES strategies showed unique effects more consistently than attachment security did, and there was limited evidence for indirect effects. Overall, results suggest that early adolescents may internalise specific ways of construing positive events and underscore the importance of jointly considering multiple parent-child factors in relation to early adolescents' regulation of PEs.