Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology ( IF 2.2 ) Pub Date : 2021-02-13 , DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2021.101259 Mackenzie Trevethan , Kathy L. Lin , Vaishali V. Raval , Xu Li , Jinsheng Hu , Neeraj Deo
Literature on parental emotion socialization does not capture the complexity of parents' emotion-related behaviors with variable-centered approaches that aggregate parent behaviors. To provide a contextually grounded portrayal of parental ES, utilizing a person-centered approach, we identified profiles of mothers' responses to their young adolescents' emotions and examined adolescent outcomes in a sample from China and India (N = 322). Mothers completed measures of socialization goals, responses to adolescents' emotions, and adolescent behavior problems. Latent profile analysis generated three profiles (i.e., adaptive, moderately adaptive, and diffuse). Mothers in the adaptive profile had higher mean levels of supportive responses except for expressive encouragement and lower mean levels of nonsupportive responses except minimizing and punitive responses than the moderately adaptive profile. Mothers in the diffuse profile had average scores across the board. Mothers in the adaptive and moderately adaptive profiles reported fewer adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems than mothers in the diffuse profile.