Let's talk about it: interactive effects of maternal socialization of race and emotions on psychological outcomes in African American youth

Recently there has been a great deal of focus on the mechanisms through which parents promote positive social and emotional development. Much of this research has focused on emotion socialization practices that support childrens emotional development as a foundation for later social and emotional competence. Recent emotion socialization research studying these processes in African American families has suggested that specific emotion socialization responses may be functioning differently in these families. Additionally, given the importance of socializing African American children to race, a separate body of literature has focused on understanding the mechanisms through which parents promote racial pride and prepare children for experiences with bias and discrimination, particularly for African American families. The current study seeks to integrate literature studying parental socialization of emotions and race, to develop a deeper understanding of how maternal socialization patterns relate to later outcomes by studying the interactive effects of maternal emotion socialization and racial socialization behaviors on psychological outcomes in a sample of African American young adults. The study explores the relations between retrospectively reported emotion socialization patterns and psychological distress. Further, the study examines whether specific patterns of racial socialization and ethnic identity emerge within our sample. Lastly, moderation analyses were conducted to test whether differences in racial socialization/racial identity profiles will amplify or attenuate these relations.INDEX WORDS: Emotion socialization; Racial socialization; Racial identity; African American; Young adults; Parenting