Cultural Differences in Parental Emotion Regulation and Responses to Children’s Negative Emotions in a Community-Based Setting: Potential Effects on Parental Psychological Well-Being

Abstract Parental emotional functioning involves both the regulation of parents’ own emotions and the ways they respond to their children’s distress, processes that are also related to parents’ psychological functioning. These processes unfold within cultural contexts that influence expectations concerning emotional expression, regulation and appropriate responses to children’s emotions. Accordingly, the present study focused on three interrelated domains: parental emotion regulation, operationalised through habitual cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression; parental emotion socialization, examined through supportive and non-supportive responses to children’s negative emotions; and parental psychological functioning, assessed in terms of current psychological distress. The study examined these processes in a culturally diverse community sample comprising Austrian, EU migrant and non-EU migrant parents. These groups reflected the main cultural-background distinctions represented in the recruited sample. Emotion-regulation strategies and emotion-socialization practices may vary according to culturally embedded norms concerning emotional expression, restraint and parenting goals; therefore, some differences across cultural-background groups were expected, although not necessarily uniformly across all aspects of parental emotional functioning. The sample included 60 parents of children aged 4–12 years. Participants completed measures of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, supportive and non-supportive responses to children’s negative emotions, and current psychological distress. The study examined cultural-background differences in parental emotion regulation and emotion-socialization responses, the associations between these two domains, and their relationships with psychological distress. Overall, cultural-background differences were limited. Neither cognitive reappraisal nor expressive suppression showed a significant overall group effect, although non-EU migrant participants reported higher suppression than Austrian participants in a pairwise comparison. Austrian participants reported more supportive responses than non-EU migrant participants, whereas non-supportive responses did not differ significantly across groups. Greater cognitive reappraisal was associated with more supportive and fewer non-supportive responses, while expressive suppression showed the opposite pattern. Reappraisal and supportive responding were associated with lower psychological distress, whereas suppression and non-supportive responding were associated with greater distress. The findings highlight the interconnectedness of parental emotion regulation, emotion socialization and psychological functioning, while suggesting that cultural-background differences may be selective rather than uniform across these domains. Keywords: parental emotion regulation; emotion socialization; cultural background; psychological distress; cognitive reappraisal; expressive suppression.