| Popis: |
Middle childhood is a period of transitions at multiple levels: the brain undergoes prolonged maturational processes, which are influenced by neuroendocrine processes, and simultaneously, parental and familial influences on children’s thoughts and behaviour are supplanted by children’s favouring of peer relationships. In the UK, these changes are concurrent with the transition from primary to secondary school. Girls in particular struggle with school transition, yet it remains unclear how these many developmental processes influence emotion behaviour during school transitions. 49 girls (M = 10.5 years, SD = 5 months) completed multimodal assessments before and after the school transition. Children’s emotion expression, parental emotion socialization, and brain maturational indices (i.e., grey matter volume and excitation/inhibition levels) were used to predict anxiety and depression at post-school transition. Whereas brain maturational factors in key emotion regulation regions such as the prefrontal cortex play a negligible role in predicting emotion behaviour post transition, parents’ emotion behaviour was critical. Parents’ use of emotion expression was related to children’s emotion expression pre-transition, suggesting that parents set the emotional climate in a family. Moreover, post transition, children’s internalising symptoms (anxiety and depression) were positively influenced by parents’ perceptions of their children’s emotion competence, and beliefs about the value of children’s emotion expression. To conclude, we found that parents’ influence on children’s emotional behaviours contributes more than indices of brain maturation to well-being in school transitions. |
