Lynn Fainsilber Katz

• Ph.D.
• University of Washington

The present study assessed parent emotion socialization as a potential protective factor for child adjustment during the first year of pediatric cancer treatment and examined whether this association varied as a function of treatment intensity and child age. Families of children newly diagnosed with cancer (N = 159, Mage = 5.6 years, range = 2–17 y...

This study examined the feasibility and accessibility of brief perinatal mindfulness-based interventions (1 prenatal, 2 postnatal) aimed at supporting the wellbeing of women and their infants living in the context of low income. First time expectant mothers (n = 202) were recruited through clinics and community-based organizations. We examined the...

Elevated child and caregiver psychopathology are observed in families of children with cancer, with a subset developing clinically significant symptoms. This study examines whether caregivers’ resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and observed emotion regulation (ER) are protective against caregiver and child psychopathology during the first y...

Objectives This study examined specificity in the effects of three perinatal mindfulness-based prevention programs that differed in their timing (prenatal, postpartum) and target (maternal well-being, parenting). Effects on maternal mental health (depression, anxiety, resilience), mindfulness, and observed parenting, as well as observed, physiologi...

Objective: Previous work has examined family income and material hardship in pediatric cancer. However, few studies have focused on perceived financial strain (PFS), or the extent to which caregivers perceive financial stress and worry related to their child's cancer. The current study addresses this gap by a) describing the trajectory of perceive...

The prevalence and impact of child maltreatment make the scientific investigation of this phenomenon a matter of vital importance. Prior research has examined associations between problematic patterns of parents' emotion reactivity and regulation and child maltreatment and maltreatment risk. However, the strength and specificity of these relationsh...

Objective: To examine effects of stress on caregiver psychological adjustment during the first year of pediatric cancer. Method: Caregivers (N = 159) of children with cancer completed monthly questionnaires assessing domains of caregiver psychological adjustment (depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress symptoms) and stress (general life st...

Objective After diagnosis, caregivers of children with cancer, particularly mothers or primary caregivers (PCs), often show elevated depressive symptoms which may negatively impact family functioning. We tested primary caregiver (PC) and secondary caregiver (SC) depressive symptoms as predictors of family, co‐parenting, and marital functioning and...

The most effective treatments for child and adolescent psychopathology are often family-based, emphasising the active involvement of family members beyond the referred individual. This book details the clinical skills, knowledge, and attitudes that form the core competencies for the delivery of evidence-based family interventions for a range of men...

Objective: Serious childhood illnesses such as cancer affect all family members. Siblings experience strong emotions and disruptions to their routines as families reorganize to confront the disease and manage treatment. Addressing siblings' psychosocial needs is a standard of care in pediatric oncology, but siblings' needs are rarely met because o...

Purpose: Despite the developmental relevance and role in social support, research on relationships between adolescents with cancer and healthy peers is limited. To address this gap, we aimed to describe adolescents' perceptions of their friendships during the 1st year following a cancer diagnosis, including relationship changes, factors that promot...

The current study describes a promising new emotion coaching (EC) parenting intervention for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) targeting emotion regulation (ER) and parent–child relationships. We discuss the development of an EC parenting intervention, outline its key elements, and use preliminary pilot data to illustrate how such a beha...

The many adverse effects of child maltreatment make the scientific investigation of this phenomenon a matter of vital importance. Although the relationship between maltreatment and problematic emotion reactivity and regulation has been studied, the strength and specificity of these associations are not yet clear. We examine the magnitude of the mal...

Background: Emotional maltreatment is the most pervasive but least studied form of abuse. Objective: In the present study, we examined the role of emotion reactivity and emotion regulation in emotional child maltreatment. Methods: We identified nine studies that compared levels of parental emotion reactivity and regulation in emotionally maltr...

Experiencing maltreatment in early childhood predicts poor parasympathetic regulation, characterized by low baseline parasympathetic activity and strong withdrawal of parasympathetic influence in response to tasks. The Promoting First Relationships® (PFR) program improves parental sensitivity toward young children in families identified as maltreat...

Objective: To describe the trajectory of patient and caregiver mental health from diagnosis through the first year of treatment for pediatric cancer and assess whether rates of clinically relevant symptoms were elevated compared with norms. We examined mean levels of internalizing and externalizing symptoms and posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS)...

Objective: The stress of having a child with cancer can impact the quality of relationships within the family. The current study describes the longitudinal trajectory of marital, parent-child, and sibling conflict beginning around the time of diagnosis through the first year of treatment. We examined the average level of marital, parent-child, and...

Objective: When a child is diagnosed with cancer, problems may arise in family relationships and negatively affect child adjustment. The current study examined patterns of spillover between marital and parent-child relationships to identify targets for intervention aimed at ameliorating family conflict. Method: Families (N = 117) were recruited...

Objective: The current study examined the effect of stress on sibling conflict during the first year of pediatric cancer treatment. Method: Families (N = 103) included a child with cancer (aged 2-17 years, Mage = 6.46, SD = 3.52) and at least one sibling aged <5 years of the child with cancer (Mage = 8.34, SD = 5.61). Primary caregivers complete...

Objective: Pediatric cancer is highly stressful for parents. The current prospective study examines the impact of several stressors (financial strain, life threat, treatment intensity, treatment-related events and negative life events) on the trajectory of marital adjustment across the first year following diagnosis. We examined whether average le...

Post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) are high among female survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), and children of parents experiencing PTSS are at heightened risk for a wide range of emotional and behavioral problems. Parenting has significant influence on child adjustment, and although links have been found between parental psychopathology...

Despite increasing societal acceptance of sexual-minority individuals, there are still gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) adolescents who experience negative mental health outcomes. Minority stress theory posits that stigma-related stress associated with sexual-minority status drives increased risk among GLB individuals. Furthermore, recent evidence...

Rates of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) are high among female survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), and children of parents experiencing PTSS are at increased risk for emotional and behavioral problems. However, little is known about the factors that may explain this relation. We examined child's emotion regulation as a moderator and...

Exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) is a traumatic life event. Almost 50 percent of IPV-exposed children show subsequent post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), and they are at increased risk for depression. We examined maternal emotion socialization and children's emotion regulation as a pathway that may protect IPV-exposed children from de...

This study examined parental emotion socialization processes associated with adolescent unipolar depressive disorder. Adolescent participants (N 5 107; 42 boys) were selected either to meet criteria for current unipolar depressive disorder or to be psychologically healthy as defined by no lifetime history of psychopathology or mental health treatme...

This study aimed to examine whether respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)-a physiological index of children's emotion regulation-moderates the relation between cancer diagnosis and internalizing problems in children. Participants were twenty-two 7-12-year survivors of acute lymphoblastic leukemia and 20 age-matched controls. RSA was calculated from ca...

Objective. To explore how components of parent meta-emotion philosophy may change over the course of children’s development. Design. Forty mothers and 38 fathers completed the Parent Meta-Emotion Interview (PMEI; Katz & Gottman, 1986) when their children were 5, 9, and 11 years old. Results. Parents’ coaching of children’s negative emotions increas...

Parental intrusiveness is associated with internalizing problems in healthy children. Given the unique demands that childhood cancer places on parents, it is important to determine whether intrusiveness operates differently in survivors of childhood cancer. The current study tested whether cancer survivorship moderates the relation between maternal...

This study compared parental socialization of adolescent positive affect in families of depressed and healthy adolescents. Participants were 107 adolescents (42 boys) aged 14 - 18 years and their parents. Half of the participants met criteria for major depressive disorder and the others were demographically matched adolescents without emotional or...

Parenting interventions, particularly those categorized as parent management training (PMT), have a large evidence base supporting their effectiveness with most families who present for treatment of childhood behavior problems. However, data suggest that PMTs are not effective at treating all families who seek services. Parental psychopathology has...

Emerging evidence suggests that fathers, more so than mothers, socialize emotions in a gender-stereotyped manner. Gender-stereotyped emotion socialization may be particularly pronounced in men perpetrating intimate partner violence (IPV), and may be detrimental to child adjustment, particularly for boys. This study explored the relation between fat...

The concept of parental meta-emotion philosophy (PMEP)—the idea that parents have an organized set of beliefs, thoughts, and feelings about their own and their children's emotions—was introduced in 1996. Since then, empirical studies have examined the validity of the PMEP construct in relation to children's psychosocial adjustment and parent and ch...

This chapter reviews current understanding of risk factors associated with childhood antisocial behavior. Familial, peer, and physiological processes associated with childhood antisocial behavior are reviewed. A family-based emotion regulation model of childhood antisocial behavior that integrates key risk factors is proposed. Although several risk...

In the past decade, there has been a dramatic growth in research examining the development of emotion from a physiological perspective. However, this widespread use of physiological measures to study emotional development coexists with relatively few guiding principles, thus reducing opportunities to move the field forward in innovative ways. The g...

Though much is known about the stable mood patterns that characterize depressive disorder, less attention has been directed to identifying and understanding the temporal dynamics of emotions. In the present study, we examined how depression affects the trajectory of dysphoric and angry adolescent emotional behavior during adolescent-parent interact...

Emotional and cognitive changes that occur during adolescence set the stage for the development of adaptive or maladaptive beliefs about emotions. Although research suggests that parents' behaviors and beliefs about emotions relate to children's emotional abilities, few studies have looked at parental socialization of children's emotions, particula...

To use observational methods to assess the quality of peer relationships in 51 7- to 12-year-old acute lymphoblastic leukemia survivors as compared to healthy children. Children were audiotaped as they engaged in free play with their best friend and interactions were coded to assess their ability to maintain engagement with one another during play...

Background: The aim of this study was to identify the aspects of cardiac physiology associated with depressive disorder early in life by examining measures of autonomic cardiac control in a community-based sample of depressed adolescents at an early phase of illness, and matched on a number of demographic factors with a nondepressed comparison gro...

The present study examined the impact of domestic violence (DV) on children's emotion regulation abilities measured via baseline vagal tone (VT). Specifically, the authors examined the relationship between DV exposure and children's regulatory functioning over time, investigating whether DV exposure was related to the trajectory of children's physi...

Depression is often characterized as a disorder of affect regulation. However, research focused on delineating the key dimensions of affective experience (other than valence) that are abnormal in depressive disorder has been scarce, especially in child and adolescent samples. As definitions of affect regulation center around processes involved in i...

The current study examines associations between emotional competence (i.e., awareness, regulation, comfort with expression) and adolescent risky behavior. Children from a longitudinal study participated at age 9 and 16 (N=88). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with children about their emotional experiences and coded for areas of emotional...

The family is widely acknowledged to play a significant role in the affective development of children prior to the adolescent period (Denham et al., 1992; Eisenberg et al., 1998; Gottman et al., 1997). Research from early and middle childhood indicates that children's affective development is influenced not only by the parent–child relationship, bu...

This study explored the associations between maternal meta-emotion philosophy (MEP) and maternal socialization of preadolescents' positive and negative affect. It also investigated whether adolescent temperament and gender moderated this association. MEP involves parental awareness and acceptance of their own and their child's emotions and their co...

The current study examined the relation between intimate partner violence (IPV) and children's reactions to a stressful peer interaction in a community-based sample. The moderating role of parental emotion coaching in buffering children from negative reactions to a peer was also examined. Children participated in a peer provocation paradigm and mot...

This article examined emotion competence in children exposed to domestic violence (DV). It also examined the hypothesis that children's emotional competence mediates relations between DV and children's later difficulties with peers and behavioral adjustment. DV was assessed when children were at the age of five, emotional competence was assessed at...

The current study examined the relations between maternal meta-emotion philosophy and adolescent depressive symptoms, as well as general adolescent adjustment and the quality of parent–child interaction. Consistent with previous findings on children in the preschool period and middle childhood, it was expected that an emotion coaching meta-emotion...

This paper examined whether individual differences in children's vagal reactivity to peer provocation were related to domestic violence within the family. It also examined the question of whether conduct-problem children who show vagal augmentation to peer provocation come from families with high levels of domestic violence. During the peer provoca...

The authors examined the notion that children's emotion regulation (ER) is a uniform skill by (a) investigating the concordance between self-report of ER and physiological measures and by (b) examining ER in a specific context (e.g., peer provocation) and context-free manner (e.g., during a semistructured interview of ER abilities). Seventy-two chi...

This article addresses the question of whether parents in domestically violent homes have difficulty talking to and helping their children manage their emotions-what has been referred to as emotion coaching. Emotion coaching as a moderator in the relationship between domestic violence (DV) and children's behavior problems was also examined. Results...

Marital hostility is linked to the father's rejecting parenting, which predicts children's aggressive peer play; the husband's emotional withdrawal from the marriage is linked to the mother's rejecting parenting, which predicts children's internalizing behavior. Deficits in children's behavioral and physiological regulation of emotion are one mecha...

Observational methods were used to examine aggressive children's peer relations in 2 contexts: when being teased by a peer and when interacting with a best friend. Because aggressive children may have more difficulty than nonaggressive children in both peer contexts, the authors also examined whether relations between behaviors across contexts vari...

We addressed the question of whether mothers of conduct-problem (CP) children differ from mothers of non-CP children in their awareness and coaching of emotion, and also examined whether mother's awareness and coaching of emotion is associated with better peer relations in CP children. Meta-emotion philosophy, assessed through audio taped interview...

A multimethod approach was used to examine relations between marital violence, coparenting, and family-level processes and children's adjustment in a community-based sample of marital violence. Two hypotheses were tested, one in which family-level and co-parenting processes mediate relations between marital violence and child functioning and one in...

This article examines the relationship between coparenting and family-level processes during preschool and peer relationship outcomes in middle childhood, and the hypothesis that children's ability to regulate emotion (as indexed by basal vagal tone and the ability to suppress vagal tone) may moderate this relationship. We predicted that high vagal...

This paper examines children's physiological reactions to stressful parent-child interactions and tests the notion that vagal tone is a physiological index of the ability to regulate emotion. Basal vagal tone and the suppression of vagal tone at age 4-5 were examined as predictors of mother ratings of child's emotion regulation ability at age 8. Tw...

this paper we present a sort of empirical existence proof that there are some things whose descriptions appear to invoke much more use of metaphorical language than others. This, while not establishing the necessity of metaphors, certainly is a first step

This study examined the relations between patterns of marital communication, child adjustment, and family functioning. Couples with a 4- or 5-year-old child were divided into three groups (N = 126) based on observed patterns of emotional communication: Hostile couples showed a cumulative increase in negative speaker behaviors over the course of a h...

Interparental Conflict and Child Development is a 2001 text that provides an in-depth analysis of the rapidly expanding body of research on the impact of interparental conflict on children. Emphasizing developmental and family systems perspectives, it investigates a range of important issues, including the processes by which exposure to conflict ma...

Otsuka Long-Evans Tokushima Fatty (OLETF) rats develop obesity, hyperglycemia, and non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus and do not express cholecystokinin A (CCK-A) receptors, the receptor subtype mediating the satiety actions of CCK. In short-term feeding tests, male OLETF rats were completely resistant to exogenous CCK, and their response to b...

Examined several protective mechanisms that may reduce deleterious correlates of marital conflict and marital dissolution in young children. One set of potential buffers focused on parent-child interaction: parental warmth, parental scaffolding/praise, and inhibition of parental rejection. As a second set of potential buffers, each parent was inter...

P. A. Cowan's (see record 83:37008) and N. Eisenberg's comments (see record 83:37010) (1) raise important questions about the conceptualization and measurement of parental meta-emotion philosophy and child affect regulation, (2) highlight individual characteristics of the child that may affect parental meta-emotion philosophy, and (3) suggest direc...

This article introduces the concepts of parental meta-emotion, which refers to parents' emotions about their own and their children's emotions, and meta-emotion philosophy, which refers to an organized set of thoughts and metaphors, a philosophy, and an approach to one's own emotions and to one's children's emotions. In the context of a longitudi...

In a previous article we reported linkages between marital hostility and children's externalizing behavior problems (Katz & Gottman, 1993). In this paper we examined whether individual differences in children's ability to regulate emotion (as indexed by vagal tone, a physiological measure of parasympathetic nervous system activity) could buffer chi...

Fifty-six families with a preschool child whose parents varied widely in parental marital satisfaction were studied at two time points: at time-I when the children were 5 years old and again at time-2 when the children were 8 years old. At time-1 each parent was separately interviewed about their “meta-emotion structure”, that is, their feelings ab...

In this study we examined how mothers' and fathers' parenting behavior during parent—child interaction related to children's ability to successfully interact with peers. Children's ability to engage in coordinated interaction, and their negativity and positivity towards peers were examined. Observational data were collected on 56 families in both p...

Reports the results of a longitudinal study on how marital interaction affects children. Observational assessment of marital interaction during conflict resolution obtained when children were 5 yrs old predicted teachers' ratings of internalizing and externalizing behaviors when the children were 8 yrs old. Two distinct and uncorrelated marital int...

Results are reported of a longitudinal study on how marital interaction affects children. Observational assessments of marital interaction during conflict resolution obtained when children were 5 years old predicted teachers' ratings of internalizing and externalizing behaviors when the children were 8 years old. Two distinct and uncorrelated marit...

A longitudinal study of 52 married couples is reported. A principal components analysis was used to select nine Time 1 variables based on a couple’s behavior during an oral history interview. These variables were able to significantly predict which couples would separate or divorce or remain intact upon 3-year follow-up. A discriminant function ana...

This volume provides a developmental perspective of the regulation and dysregulation of emotion, in particular, how children learn about feelings and how they learn to deal with both positive and negative feelings. Emotion regulation involves the interaction of physical, behavioural and cognitive processes in response to changes in one's emotional...

Reports an investigation of the effects of marital discord on the peer interactions and physical health of preschool children. A sample of families that ranged widely in marital satisfaction and had a 4- to 5-yr-old child participated in several home and laboratory sessions involving marital, parent-child, and peer (with a best friend) interaction....

Two hypotheses concerning the function of metaphor production were examined in participants' descriptions of instances of emotional states and events. Participants provided verbal descriptions of emotional states they had experienced and of actions in which they had engaged as they experienced those states. Results showed that descriptions of emoti...

With metaphoric quality divided into an appropriateness and novelty component, college-student subjects rated 75 metaphoric sentences on those components and on imageability. Different subjects were assigned to each of the three rating conditions (n=45 in each). Correlations based on mean ratings of the metaphors indicated that imageability was neg...

Studied creativity in 15 obsessives, 16 phobics, and 39 nonpsychiatric (as measured by the Leyton Obsessional Inventory) university students. Ss were tested on Wallach-Kogan Tests of Creativity (WKTC) and Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). Data indicate that creativity as measured by WKTC and TTCT does not vary as a function of obsessional...