Examining Whether and How Family Functioning Relates to Emotion Regulation: A Multi-method Investigation

Evidence suggests that family functioning, or the quality of relationships and interactions between family members, is associated with emotion regulation, a goal-oriented process of managing emotional responses. The current challenge in understanding their associations, however, lies in the (i) multidimensional nature and (ii) overlapping features of both constructs, as well as the (iii) lack of evidence supporting their causal relations. The current thesis first sought to organise previous research and assess the average independent correlations between the different dimensions of family functioning and aspects of emotion regulation in a meta-analytic review (Study 1). The results of Study 1 revealed some significant associations, specifically demonstrating that high levels of cohesion, relationship satisfaction, and positive parenting behaviours are associated with more use of cognitive change strategies and less difficulty in emotion regulation. Study 2 tested the possibility of measuring family functioning from recalled narratives. Results showed that family communication significantly predicted emotion regulation and pointed to the possibility of experimentally testing the hypothesis that family functioning affects emotion regulation. The subsequent studies randomly assigned people to recall events reflecting either good vs. poor family communication. Study 3 revealed significant shifts in people’s beliefs about their family functioning following the recall task. The final two studies showed that recalling family events affects interpersonal (Study 5) but not intrapersonal (Study 4) emotion regulation. Overall, the current research demonstrated evidence of independent associations between dimensions of family functioning and aspects of emotion regulation. Furthermore, by employing a practical approach to manipulating beliefs about family functioning, this thesis advances our understanding by providing the first causal evidence that family communication influences interpersonal emotion regulation.