Exposure to child maltreatment and maternal depression are significant risk factors for the development of psychopathology. Difficulties in caregiving, including poor emotion socialization behavior, may mediate these associations. Thus, enhancing supportive parent emotion socialization may be a key transdiagnostic target for preventive interventions designed for these families. Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) is a brief relational intervention designed to improve maternal emotion socialization behavior by enhancing maltreating mothers’ sensitive guidance during reminiscing with their young children. This study evaluated associations between maltreatment, maternal depressive symptoms, and the RET intervention with changes in children’s maladjustment across one year following the intervention, and examined the extent to which intervention-related improvement in maternal emotion socialization mediated change in children’s maladjustment. Participants were 242 children (aged 36 to 86 months) and their mothers from maltreating (66%) and nonmaltreating (34%) families. Results indicated that RET intervention-related improvement in maternal sensitive guidance mediated the effects of RET on reduced child maladjustment among maltreated children one year later. By comparison, poor sensitive guidance mediated the effects of maltreatment on higher child maladjustment among families that did not receive the RET intervention. Direct effects of maternal depressive symptoms on child maladjustment were also observed. This suggests RET is effective in facilitating emotional and behavioral adjustment in maltreated children by improving maltreating mothers’ emotional socialization behaviors.

暴露于儿童虐待和母亲抑郁症是精神病理学发展的重要危险因素。照顾困难，包括不良的情绪社交行为，可能会调节这些关联。因此，增强支持性父母的情绪社交可能是为这些家庭设计的预防性干预措施的关键跨诊断目标。回忆和情绪训练 (RET) 是一种简短的关系干预，旨在通过增强虐待母亲在与幼儿回忆时的敏感引导来改善母亲的情绪社会化行为。这项研究评估了虐待、母亲抑郁症状和 RET 干预与干预后一年内儿童适应不良变化之间的关联，并检验了与干预相关的母亲情绪社会化改善在多大程度上介导了儿童适应不良的变化。参与者是来自虐待 (66%) 和非虐待 (34%) 家庭的 242 名儿童（36 至 86 个月）及其母亲。结果表明，RET 干预相关的母亲敏感指导的改善介导了 RET 对减少一年后受虐待儿童的儿童适应不良的影响。相比之下，在没有接受 RET 干预的家庭中，较差的敏感指导介导了虐待对更高儿童适应不良的影响。还观察到母亲抑郁症状对儿童适应不良的直接影响。