Patricia A Smiley
Biographic Data
| ID | 763116 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patricia A Smiley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patricia A |
| FAMILY NAME | Smiley |
| SIGNATURE | SMILEY P A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pomona College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7460-6070 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Maternal Emotion Regulation and Parenting: A Physiological Perspective
The psychological capacity for emotion regulation (ER) facilitates sensitive caregiving and fosters positive child outcomes. Parasympathetic regulation, indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), is an important physiological component of ER. While growing evidence supports the link between parents’ physiological ER and parenting behaviors, few studies distinguish parents’ global ER capacity from ER in parenting‐specific contexts, which can p…
Adult attachment as a predictor of savoring quality in mothers of toddlers: Results from a 4-week randomized trial
Parental attachment is a robust predictor of parents' emotion regulation and parent-child interaction quality. However, little is known about how attachment representations influence parents' ability to engage in savoring, the process of attending to and prolonging positive emotional experiences. This study examined the association between maternal attachment and two aspects of savoring quality in the context of a large randomized controlled tria…
Culturally adapting relational savoring: A therapeutic approach to improve relationship quality
Relational savoring (RS) is a brief, strengths‐based approach to heightening attentional focus to moments of positive connectedness within relationships. RS can be administered preventatively or within an intervention context when a therapist aspires to foster more optimal relational functioning. Typically administered within a one‐on‐one therapy setting, RS has demonstrated efficacy in enhancing intra‐ and interpersonal outcomes. To increase acc…
Predicting fidelity and treatment outcomes in savoring interventions among mothers of young children
Savoring impacts parents’ emotions and parent–child relationship quality. Using data from a randomized controlled trial ( N = 164 mothers of 18–27‐month‐olds, 37 interveners) conducted with a community sample in the United States, this study examined predictors of fidelity and treatment outcomes across two savoring preventative interventions (relational savoring and personal savoring). Treatment outcome indicators were selected from a battery adm…
Covid-19 Pandemic and Changes in Children’s Behavioral Problems: The Mediating Role of Maternal Depressive Symptoms
The COVID-19 pandemic has been linked to a range of behavioral problems in children. To date, however, longitudinal studies with data prior to the pandemic are rare, and moreover, few studies have examined the family context. This is notable as evidence suggests that mothers were highly vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic, and stress proliferation models would argue that children's wellbeing are undoubtedly affected by maternal wellbeing. I…
Mother–child dyadic responses to children facing challenges: An examination across ethnicities
The current study (a) examined ethnic differences in mothers' and children's responses to children's performance in a challenging task, (b) tested the associations among children's desire for assistance, maternal control, and children's emotional responses to the challenge, and (c) explored whether these associations held across three ethnicities-Asian Americans (AA), Latinx Americans (LA), and European Americans (EA). Results showed that childre…
Savoring interventions for mothers of young children: Mechanisms linking relational savoring and personal savoring to reflective functioning
Parenting interventions can improve parenting outcomes, with widespread implications for children's developmental trajectories. Relational savoring (RS) is a brief attachment‐based intervention with high potential for dissemination. Here we examine data from a recent intervention trial in order to isolate the mechanisms by which savoring predicts reflective functioning (RF) at treatment follow‐up through an examination of the content of savoring …
Relational savoring intervention: Positive impacts for mothers and evidence of cultural compatibility for Latinas
Parenting young children poses numerous emotion regulation challenges, and prevention programs that promote emotion regulation skills can help with this important task of parenthood. Relational savoring (RS), which entails savoring a positive experience of interpersonal connectedness, is a brief manualized intervention program, 4 weeks in length, grounded in positive psychology and attachment theory. In the current longitudinal, randomized, contr…
The moderating effect of facial emotion recognition in maternal emotion socialization and child socioemotional adjustment
The current study investigated relations among maternal emotion socialization, children's facial emotion recognition (FER), and children's behavioral problems. A sample of 118 preschoolers ( M age = 41.96 months) and their mothers participated. Mothers reported their reactions to children's negative emotions and rated children's internalizing and externalizing problems by completing the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale and Child Beh…
Stressed out and fed up: The effect of stress on maternal feeding behaviors and the moderating role of executive function
Associations between mothers’ emotion regulation and real‐time experiences of negative emotion: The moderating role of caregiving context
Parents’ emotion regulation and emotional experiences have important consequences for family well‐being and child outcomes. Little is known about whether traitlike emotion regulation abilities predict statelike experiences of real‐time negative emotion. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), this study examines associations between mothers’ self‐reported emotion regulation abilities and their real‐time experiences of negative emotion, as we…
The roles of life stress and preventive health behaviors on parent mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted millions of lives, with life stress and daily hassles having a potential impact on parent mental health. This study examined whether preventive health behaviors (e.g. social distancing, mask wearing) and social support relate to parent mental health. In a cross-sectional analysis of parents ( N = 176, May-September 2020), life events and daily hassles were positively associated with depressive and anxiety sympt…
Responding to Children’s Diverse Gender Expression: Validation of a Parent-Report Measure of Gender-Related Conditional Regard
Epidemiological studies suggest that more youth are identifying as gender expansive (e.g., transgender, gender nonconforming) than ever before. However, due to stressors like discrimination, gender minorities remain at significantly higher risk for mental and physical health problems than their cisgender peers. While initial research has shown that parental support of youth’s minority gender identities may be protective, further research is neede…
The development of toddlers’ emotion regulation within the family system: Associations with observed parent-child synchrony and interparental relationship satisfaction
Higher maternal reflective functioning is associated with toddlers’ adaptive emotion regulation
Parental reflective functioning (RF), the ability to consider the child's behavior as a function of mental states (cognitions, emotions), is theorized to promote emotion regulation in children via its positive impact on parenting sensitivity. Using a sample of mothers and toddlers ( N = 151 dyads; 41% Latinx; 54% girls; M Age = 21 months; SD Age = 2.5 months), we measured mothers’ self‐reported RF (high RF = low certainty/high interest–curiosity/…
Exploring the complexity of mothers’ real-time emotions while caregiving
Existing research suggests that parenthood is both emotionally rewarding and demanding, yet little work has examined multiple facets of parents' emotions. The current study examines the complexity of parents' emotions by examining the intensity, variability, and emodiversity of mothers' positive and negative emotions across caregiving and noncaregiving contexts. Data were collected from 136 mothers of young children using ecological momentary ass…
Reflective functioning and empathy among mothers of school-aged children: Charting the space between
Parental child-focused reflective functioning (RF)-understanding children's behavior as a function of mental states-and parental empathy -understanding, resonating with, and feeling concern for children's emotions-have each been linked to sensitive caregiving and children's attachment security in separate studies, but they have been neither directly compared nor have researchers tested whether they interact in predicting child outcomes. In this a…
Parent Control and Child Shame: Associations with Children’s Task Persistence and Depressive Symptoms in Middle Childhood
SYNOPSISObjective. Understanding how parents socialize shame may shed light on two related issues: why some children experience intense shame, and whether shame serves as an indirect pathway between parenting behavior and academic and mental health outcomes in middle childhood. Design. This cross-sectional study examined socialization of shame with mothers (N = 98, Mage = 38.73 years) and their school-aged children (53 girls, Mage = 11.55 years).…
Children’s and mothers’ cardiovascular reactivity to a standardized laboratory stressor: Unique relations with maternal anxiety and overcontrol
Research documents bidirectional associations between parental overcontrol (OC) and children's anxiety; OC may place children at risk for anxiety and also may occur in response to children's requests for help. However, to date no studies have examined children's or parents' in-the-moment emotional responses to OC. Using a community sample of mothers and school-age children, we examine the individual and interactive influences of maternal OC, mate…
Reflective functioning, physiological reactivity, and overcontrol in mothers: Links with school-aged children’s reflective functioning
Theorists argue that parental reflective functioning (PRF) is activated in response to emotions, potentially supporting parenting sensitivity even when arousal is high. That is, when parents become emotionally reactive when interacting with their children, those who can use PRF to understand their children's mental states should be able to parent sensitively, which, in turn, should promote children's ability to understand their own mental states.…
Language Matching Among Mother‐child Dyads: Associations with Child Attachment and Emotion Reactivity
Links between mother‐infant affective matching and attachment security are well‐documented, but research on other types of behavioral matching and attachment security are lacking, as are studies that examine these constructs later in children's development. We examine language style matching (LSM) between mothers and their school‐aged children (N = 68), using interviews with each dyad member. As predicted, regressions revealed that higher mother‐…
Attachment and maternal sensitivity in middle childhood
According to theory, maternal sensitivity should be associated with attachment security in middle childhood. We measure two aspects of maternal sensitivity— affective understanding, a component of parental mentalization, and affective synchrony, a component of parental empathy. We tested our hypotheses within a diverse sample of school-aged children (48.6% female, M age = 10.27, SD age = 1.09) and their mothers ( N = 112 dyads) at baseline and af…
Is it About Me, You, or Us? Stress Reactivity Correlates of Discrepancies in We-Talk Among Parents and Preadolescent Children
Mother Emotion, Child Temperament, and Young Children's Helpless Responses to Failure
Young children differ in their responses to failure, displaying mastery or helpless behavior patterns. We examine the moderating role of child temperament on the association between parent warmth/negativity and children's helpless responses to failure. Regarding temperament, we focus on tendencies to experience interest and sadness because they entail task engagement and withdrawal, respectively. We measured mother (n=150) expressions of positive…
Parental Anxiety Prospectively Predicts Fearful Children’s Physiological Recovery from Stress
Reflective functioning, physiological reactivity, and overcontrol in mothers: Links with school-aged children’s reflective functioning
Theorists argue that parental reflective functioning (PRF) is activated in response to emotions, potentially supporting parenting sensitivity even when arousal is high. That is, when parents become emotionally reactive when interacting with their children, those who can use PRF to understand their children's mental states should be able to parent sensitively, which, in turn, should promote children's ability to understand their own mental states.…
Savoring interventions for mothers of young children: Mechanisms linking relational savoring and personal savoring to reflective functioning
Parenting interventions can improve parenting outcomes, with widespread implications for children's developmental trajectories. Relational savoring (RS) is a brief attachment‐based intervention with high potential for dissemination. Here we examine data from a recent intervention trial in order to isolate the mechanisms by which savoring predicts reflective functioning (RF) at treatment follow‐up through an examination of the content of savoring …
Higher maternal reflective functioning is associated with toddlers’ adaptive emotion regulation
Parental reflective functioning (RF), the ability to consider the child's behavior as a function of mental states (cognitions, emotions), is theorized to promote emotion regulation in children via its positive impact on parenting sensitivity. Using a sample of mothers and toddlers ( N = 151 dyads; 41% Latinx; 54% girls; M Age = 21 months; SD Age = 2.5 months), we measured mothers’ self‐reported RF (high RF = low certainty/high interest–curiosity/…
Language Matching Among Mother‐child Dyads: Associations with Child Attachment and Emotion Reactivity
Links between mother‐infant affective matching and attachment security are well‐documented, but research on other types of behavioral matching and attachment security are lacking, as are studies that examine these constructs later in children's development. We examine language style matching (LSM) between mothers and their school‐aged children (N = 68), using interviews with each dyad member. As predicted, regressions revealed that higher mother‐…
Attachment and maternal sensitivity in middle childhood
According to theory, maternal sensitivity should be associated with attachment security in middle childhood. We measure two aspects of maternal sensitivity— affective understanding, a component of parental mentalization, and affective synchrony, a component of parental empathy. We tested our hypotheses within a diverse sample of school-aged children (48.6% female, M age = 10.27, SD age = 1.09) and their mothers ( N = 112 dyads) at baseline and af…
The roles of life stress and preventive health behaviors on parent mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted millions of lives, with life stress and daily hassles having a potential impact on parent mental health. This study examined whether preventive health behaviors (e.g. social distancing, mask wearing) and social support relate to parent mental health. In a cross-sectional analysis of parents ( N = 176, May-September 2020), life events and daily hassles were positively associated with depressive and anxiety sympt…
The development of toddlers’ emotion regulation within the family system: Associations with observed parent-child synchrony and interparental relationship satisfaction
Is it About Me, You, or Us? Stress Reactivity Correlates of Discrepancies in We-Talk Among Parents and Preadolescent Children
Adult attachment as a predictor of savoring quality in mothers of toddlers: Results from a 4-week randomized trial
Parental attachment is a robust predictor of parents' emotion regulation and parent-child interaction quality. However, little is known about how attachment representations influence parents' ability to engage in savoring, the process of attending to and prolonging positive emotional experiences. This study examined the association between maternal attachment and two aspects of savoring quality in the context of a large randomized controlled tria…
Predicting fidelity and treatment outcomes in savoring interventions among mothers of young children
Savoring impacts parents’ emotions and parent–child relationship quality. Using data from a randomized controlled trial ( N = 164 mothers of 18–27‐month‐olds, 37 interveners) conducted with a community sample in the United States, this study examined predictors of fidelity and treatment outcomes across two savoring preventative interventions (relational savoring and personal savoring). Treatment outcome indicators were selected from a battery adm…
Stressed out and fed up: The effect of stress on maternal feeding behaviors and the moderating role of executive function
Associations between mothers’ emotion regulation and real‐time experiences of negative emotion: The moderating role of caregiving context
Parents’ emotion regulation and emotional experiences have important consequences for family well‐being and child outcomes. Little is known about whether traitlike emotion regulation abilities predict statelike experiences of real‐time negative emotion. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), this study examines associations between mothers’ self‐reported emotion regulation abilities and their real‐time experiences of negative emotion, as we…
Mother Emotion, Child Temperament, and Young Children's Helpless Responses to Failure
Young children differ in their responses to failure, displaying mastery or helpless behavior patterns. We examine the moderating role of child temperament on the association between parent warmth/negativity and children's helpless responses to failure. Regarding temperament, we focus on tendencies to experience interest and sadness because they entail task engagement and withdrawal, respectively. We measured mother (n=150) expressions of positive…
Performance Concern, Contingent Self‐worth, and Responses to Repeated Achievement Failure in Second Graders
Individual differences in emotion, cognitions, and task choice following achievement failure are found among four‐ to seven‐year‐olds. However, neither performance deterioration during failure nor generalization after failure—aspects of the helpless pattern in 10‐year‐olds—have been reliably demonstrated in this age group. In the present study, 78 second graders worked on a series of unsolvable and solvable puzzles and then on a figure‐matching t…
Learning about self and other during requests
Requests engage children and their caregivers in conversations in which personal goals are at stake. By making requests and attending to their caregivers' replies, toddlers learn to conceptualize self and other as intentional agents in a social network
Intention Understanding and Partner‐Sensitive Behaviors in Young Children’s Peer Interactions
Recent research on peer interaction shows that complex, coordinated play emerges around 24 months. Increased understanding of others’ intentions has been proposed as a reason for its emergence at this juncture. In this study, we assessed understanding of the intentional structure of human action in children aged 19 to 39 months by eliciting verbal explanations of observed action. We hypothesized that more elaborated understanding of intention wou…
Performance Concern, Contingent Self‐worth, and Responses to Repeated Achievement Failure in Second Graders
Individual differences in emotion, cognitions, and task choice following achievement failure are found among four‐ to seven‐year‐olds. However, neither performance deterioration during failure nor generalization after failure—aspects of the helpless pattern in 10‐year‐olds—have been reliably demonstrated in this age group. In the present study, 78 second graders worked on a series of unsolvable and solvable puzzles and then on a figure‐matching t…
Parental Anxiety Prospectively Predicts Fearful Children’s Physiological Recovery from Stress
Mother Emotion, Child Temperament, and Young Children's Helpless Responses to Failure
Young children differ in their responses to failure, displaying mastery or helpless behavior patterns. We examine the moderating role of child temperament on the association between parent warmth/negativity and children's helpless responses to failure. Regarding temperament, we focus on tendencies to experience interest and sadness because they entail task engagement and withdrawal, respectively. We measured mother (n=150) expressions of positive…
Language Matching Among Mother‐child Dyads: Associations with Child Attachment and Emotion Reactivity
Links between mother‐infant affective matching and attachment security are well‐documented, but research on other types of behavioral matching and attachment security are lacking, as are studies that examine these constructs later in children's development. We examine language style matching (LSM) between mothers and their school‐aged children (N = 68), using interviews with each dyad member. As predicted, regressions revealed that higher mother‐…
Attachment and maternal sensitivity in middle childhood
According to theory, maternal sensitivity should be associated with attachment security in middle childhood. We measure two aspects of maternal sensitivity— affective understanding, a component of parental mentalization, and affective synchrony, a component of parental empathy. We tested our hypotheses within a diverse sample of school-aged children (48.6% female, M age = 10.27, SD age = 1.09) and their mothers ( N = 112 dyads) at baseline and af…
Is it About Me, You, or Us? Stress Reactivity Correlates of Discrepancies in We-Talk Among Parents and Preadolescent Children
Children’s and mothers’ cardiovascular reactivity to a standardized laboratory stressor: Unique relations with maternal anxiety and overcontrol
Research documents bidirectional associations between parental overcontrol (OC) and children's anxiety; OC may place children at risk for anxiety and also may occur in response to children's requests for help. However, to date no studies have examined children's or parents' in-the-moment emotional responses to OC. Using a community sample of mothers and school-age children, we examine the individual and interactive influences of maternal OC, mate…
Reflective functioning, physiological reactivity, and overcontrol in mothers: Links with school-aged children’s reflective functioning
Theorists argue that parental reflective functioning (PRF) is activated in response to emotions, potentially supporting parenting sensitivity even when arousal is high. That is, when parents become emotionally reactive when interacting with their children, those who can use PRF to understand their children's mental states should be able to parent sensitively, which, in turn, should promote children's ability to understand their own mental states.…
Parent Control and Child Shame: Associations with Children’s Task Persistence and Depressive Symptoms in Middle Childhood
SYNOPSISObjective. Understanding how parents socialize shame may shed light on two related issues: why some children experience intense shame, and whether shame serves as an indirect pathway between parenting behavior and academic and mental health outcomes in middle childhood. Design. This cross-sectional study examined socialization of shame with mothers (N = 98, Mage = 38.73 years) and their school-aged children (53 girls, Mage = 11.55 years).…
Exploring the complexity of mothers’ real-time emotions while caregiving
Existing research suggests that parenthood is both emotionally rewarding and demanding, yet little work has examined multiple facets of parents' emotions. The current study examines the complexity of parents' emotions by examining the intensity, variability, and emodiversity of mothers' positive and negative emotions across caregiving and noncaregiving contexts. Data were collected from 136 mothers of young children using ecological momentary ass…
Reflective functioning and empathy among mothers of school-aged children: Charting the space between
Parental child-focused reflective functioning (RF)-understanding children's behavior as a function of mental states-and parental empathy -understanding, resonating with, and feeling concern for children's emotions-have each been linked to sensitive caregiving and children's attachment security in separate studies, but they have been neither directly compared nor have researchers tested whether they interact in predicting child outcomes. In this a…
Responding to Children’s Diverse Gender Expression: Validation of a Parent-Report Measure of Gender-Related Conditional Regard
Epidemiological studies suggest that more youth are identifying as gender expansive (e.g., transgender, gender nonconforming) than ever before. However, due to stressors like discrimination, gender minorities remain at significantly higher risk for mental and physical health problems than their cisgender peers. While initial research has shown that parental support of youth’s minority gender identities may be protective, further research is neede…
The development of toddlers’ emotion regulation within the family system: Associations with observed parent-child synchrony and interparental relationship satisfaction
Higher maternal reflective functioning is associated with toddlers’ adaptive emotion regulation
Parental reflective functioning (RF), the ability to consider the child's behavior as a function of mental states (cognitions, emotions), is theorized to promote emotion regulation in children via its positive impact on parenting sensitivity. Using a sample of mothers and toddlers ( N = 151 dyads; 41% Latinx; 54% girls; M Age = 21 months; SD Age = 2.5 months), we measured mothers’ self‐reported RF (high RF = low certainty/high interest–curiosity/…
Relational savoring intervention: Positive impacts for mothers and evidence of cultural compatibility for Latinas
Parenting young children poses numerous emotion regulation challenges, and prevention programs that promote emotion regulation skills can help with this important task of parenthood. Relational savoring (RS), which entails savoring a positive experience of interpersonal connectedness, is a brief manualized intervention program, 4 weeks in length, grounded in positive psychology and attachment theory. In the current longitudinal, randomized, contr…
The moderating effect of facial emotion recognition in maternal emotion socialization and child socioemotional adjustment
The current study investigated relations among maternal emotion socialization, children's facial emotion recognition (FER), and children's behavioral problems. A sample of 118 preschoolers ( M age = 41.96 months) and their mothers participated. Mothers reported their reactions to children's negative emotions and rated children's internalizing and externalizing problems by completing the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale and Child Beh…
Stressed out and fed up: The effect of stress on maternal feeding behaviors and the moderating role of executive function
Associations between mothers’ emotion regulation and real‐time experiences of negative emotion: The moderating role of caregiving context
Parents’ emotion regulation and emotional experiences have important consequences for family well‐being and child outcomes. Little is known about whether traitlike emotion regulation abilities predict statelike experiences of real‐time negative emotion. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), this study examines associations between mothers’ self‐reported emotion regulation abilities and their real‐time experiences of negative emotion, as we…
The roles of life stress and preventive health behaviors on parent mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted millions of lives, with life stress and daily hassles having a potential impact on parent mental health. This study examined whether preventive health behaviors (e.g. social distancing, mask wearing) and social support relate to parent mental health. In a cross-sectional analysis of parents ( N = 176, May-September 2020), life events and daily hassles were positively associated with depressive and anxiety sympt…
Covid-19 Pandemic and Changes in Children’s Behavioral Problems: The Mediating Role of Maternal Depressive Symptoms
The COVID-19 pandemic has been linked to a range of behavioral problems in children. To date, however, longitudinal studies with data prior to the pandemic are rare, and moreover, few studies have examined the family context. This is notable as evidence suggests that mothers were highly vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic, and stress proliferation models would argue that children's wellbeing are undoubtedly affected by maternal wellbeing. I…
Mother–child dyadic responses to children facing challenges: An examination across ethnicities
The current study (a) examined ethnic differences in mothers' and children's responses to children's performance in a challenging task, (b) tested the associations among children's desire for assistance, maternal control, and children's emotional responses to the challenge, and (c) explored whether these associations held across three ethnicities-Asian Americans (AA), Latinx Americans (LA), and European Americans (EA). Results showed that childre…
Savoring interventions for mothers of young children: Mechanisms linking relational savoring and personal savoring to reflective functioning
Parenting interventions can improve parenting outcomes, with widespread implications for children's developmental trajectories. Relational savoring (RS) is a brief attachment‐based intervention with high potential for dissemination. Here we examine data from a recent intervention trial in order to isolate the mechanisms by which savoring predicts reflective functioning (RF) at treatment follow‐up through an examination of the content of savoring …
Culturally adapting relational savoring: A therapeutic approach to improve relationship quality
Relational savoring (RS) is a brief, strengths‐based approach to heightening attentional focus to moments of positive connectedness within relationships. RS can be administered preventatively or within an intervention context when a therapist aspires to foster more optimal relational functioning. Typically administered within a one‐on‐one therapy setting, RS has demonstrated efficacy in enhancing intra‐ and interpersonal outcomes. To increase acc…
Psychology (28 works) · Developmental psychology (26 works) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (23 works) · Clinical Psychology (17 works) · Attachment and Relationship Dynamics (15 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Clinical Psychology (12 works) · Psychiatry (11 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Maternal Mental Health During Pregnancy and Postpartum (8 works)