Parental expressed emotion: An analysis of verbal and facial expressed emotion and associations with childhood emotional and behavioural problems.

Dorrans, Ellie 2025. Parental expressed emotion: An analysis of verbal and facial expressed emotion and associations with childhood emotional and behavioural problems. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Parents are the primary source of emotional information for young children, shaping early emotional and behavioural development through their influence on the family emotional climate. This thesis examined how Expressed Emotion (EE), a measure of this emotional climate, relates to the severity of internalizing and externalizing problems in school-referred children assessed at the Neurodevelopment Assessment Unit (NDAU). Chapter 2 investigated whether EE predicts child outcomes beyond parental anxiety and depression, well-established risk factors for child psychopathology. EE was assessed using the Five-Minute Speech Sample (FMSS), in which parents provide a spontaneous monologue about their child and relationship. This chapter introduced a novel analysis of EE as a principal component and implemented a developmentally appropriate coding scheme. Despite high rates of parental anxiety (52%) and depression (24%), EE emerged a stronger predictor of child difficulties than parental mental health, underscoring the importance of parental EE. While the FMSS captures the content and emotional tone, communication is also nonverbal. Chapter 3 introduced an innovative approach using automated facial expressivity software to quantify maternal facial affect during the FMSS. Emotional incongruence, specifically reduced anger expressions when speaking negatively, was linked to the severity of child difficulties and predicted outcomes beyond verbal EE and parental psychopathology. Chapter 4 examined associations between EE, children’s facial emotion recognition (FER) ability and the severity of child difficulties. High-intensity negative FER was best predicted by EE and externalizing problems, whereas low-intensity FER was predicted by EE alone. Impairments in a child’s ability to distinguish between different types of emotional V expressions, known as discrimination accuracy, was best predicted by EE. This suggests EE may be a potential mechanism in disrupted parental emotional modelling. Together, these studies highlight the parental EE as a critical transdiagnostic risk factor in child psychopathology; this knowledge could be used to inform the development of interventions for at-risk children.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Psychology
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 May 2026
Last Modified:	05 May 2026 10:11
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/186457

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