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175 YEARS President: Tuajuanda C. Jordan, PhD
Scott Mirabile November 2015
Revised Measure Provides Means to
Assess Parents’ Ignoring of Children’s Emotions
Mirabile
Parents who intentionally ignore children’s negative emotions may actually increase their children’s expressions of anger, aggression, and disproportionate emotional behaviors.
Ignoring children’s emotional outbursts is a strategy commonly employed by parents with a wide range of psychological know-how, drawing on their intuition, family tradition, modeling, or simple desperation. Despite its widespread use, parental ignoring has previously received little attention or assessment by child development professionals. “For whatever reason, the folks who are developing questionnaires to assess these kinds of behaviors didn’t focus on ignoring responses,” noted Scott P. Mirabile, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. The one questionnaire that had assessed ignoring failed to differentiate it clearly from other types of parental responses. “It occurred to me, that it would not be difficult to add ignoring questions to a very widely used questionnaire.” Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES) was a questionnaire well-suited to Mirabile’s purpose. Designed in 1990 to “measure the degree to which parents perceive themselves as reactive to young children’s negative affect in distressful situations,” CCNES contained 12 items, each with six options reflecting specific parental coping responses. Each option could be rated on a scale from 1 to 7, with 1 = very unlikely and 7 = very likely. “I added another response option to each item,” Mirabile explains. “The original question might say something like: ‘If my child is riding a bicycle and falls down and starts to cry, I would ___’ and give a parent six different options. I added another line like: ‘I would ignore my child’s crying’ or ‘I wouldn’t respond to my child’s crying.’” Mirabile’s added options were designed to reflect whether parents ignored the child in general or ignored the child’s emotion specifically. Let’s clarify how these responses differ: If a child is begging for candy in the checkout aisle and starts to cry, a complete ignorer of everything doesn’t look at the child and keeps putting objects on the belt. A parent who just ignores the emotion might say: “We have candy at home,” or “Let’s wait ‘til we get out of here and then talk about it.” That parent is engaging the child, but not discussing or naming the emotion. Both strategies stand in contrast to a parent who says: “I understand you’re upset now, but this candy isn’t good for you. Let’s go home and have some fruit.” This response labels the child’s feeling and offers a solution as well. Armed with the modified CCNES, Mirabile recruited parents of 3- to 6-year-old children from three Maryland preschools. The 81 parents participating had an average age of 34.8 years and 90% were female; approximately 89% were Anglo-American, 12% African-American, 1% Hispanic, and 1% Asian-American, with some parents reporting multiple ethnicities.
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In addition to providing demographic data and completing the modified CCNES, participants filled out the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC), the Emotion Regulation Skills Questionnaire (ERSQ), the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation – Short Form (SCBE), and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). These assessments provided scores indicating emotion regulation, children’s use of emotion-regulation strategies, a measure of child lability, social competence, and a child’s tendency to internalize (anxiety-withdrawal) or externalize (anger-aggression) their problems.
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The study’s results, published recently in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology, highlight several aspects of parental ignoring behavior: Ignoring responses showed significant positive relationship with punitive and minimizing parental responses, and significant negative relationship with expressive and encouraging parental responses – a strategy called “expressive encouragement,” in which parents encourage children’s expression of negative emotions. Together, the results suggest that ignoring should properly be considered an unsupportive emotion socialization strategy. In addition, the finding that parents’ ignoring correlates positively with children’s emotional lability, anger, and aggression suggests that parental ignoring is not only a response to children’s poor emotional behavior, but also may be a cause of it! For example, children may perceive ignoring as a non-response, think a parent is failing to notice their emotion, and so turn up the intensity of their behavior. “There could certainly be a process whereby a child starts off turning the volume up, and when that doesn’t get them anything after weeks or months or years, they could start to suppress instead. And so both of those possibilities – amping up the negative lability AND suppressing the negative lability – could be true … That might seem like a good thing, but maybe their suppressing and suppressing isn’t as good as understanding and dealing constructively with their emotion,” Mirabile suggests. Despite these results, Mirabile is hesitant to denounce “ignoring” as a bad parenting strategy. “It would be premature to say, ‘Well ignoring is always a bad strategy, and therefore counselors need to help parents understand that’s an ignoring response and you shouldn’t ignore emotions.’ Maybe that’s a good idea, but we don’t really know enough yet about under what situations, what emotions, for what age range, ignoring is going to be a non-helpful strategy.” The present study establishes the “ignoring” subscale Mirabile added to CCNES as an internally consistent, reliable, and valid tool. It also draws the attention of psychologists to “ignoring children’s emotions” as an unsupportive emotion socialization strategy in young children. Mirabile hopes to see increased interest in this area, especially observational research and longitudinal studies in early and middle childhood to better understand the long-term effects of parental ignoring on children’s emotional competence.
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Topping Out Anne Arundel Hall Topping Out Ceremony On Thursday, Oct. 29, the last beam was installed at the new Anne Arundel Hall facility. Project stakeholders Trustee Michael O’ Brien, Historic St. Mary’s City’s Gina Faden, and Delegates Tony O’ Donnell and Deborah Rey joined Vice President Chip Jackson and President Tuajuanda C. Jordan to commemorate the occasion. After brief remarks, members of the campus community in attendance were invited to sign the steel beam before it was hoisted into the building’s structure. Anne Arundel Hall will be home to Anthropology, International Languages & Cultures, Museum Studies, Center for the Study of Democracy, and an Historic St. Mary’s City museum.
Pride Tours
This fall, the Offices of Institutional Advancement and Admissions have paired up to put on four “Pride Tours,” where alumni and prospective students and their parents in Baltimore, Boston, Manhattan and Prince George County (on Dec. 3) join President Tuajuanda C. Jordan for a special evening as she discusses the exciting future of St. Mary’s College.
Associate Professor Betül Başaran Awarded NEH Grant to Lead Summer Seminar Associate Professor of Religious Studies Betül Başaran has received a prestigious institutional grant for St. Mary’s College of Maryland from the National Endowment Başaran for the Humanities to direct a four-week seminar for college and university professors in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2016. Her seminar is titled “Transcending Boundaries: The Ottoman Empire, Europe and the Mediterranean World, 1500-1800.” Sixteen scholars from around the country will join Başaran for an exploration of the history of religious, political and economic exchanges in the larger Mediterranean world in ways that transcend false distinctions between the so-called Christian and Islamic worlds and their societies in the early modern era. NEH grants are highly competitive and involve a rigorous peer-
review and selection process to ensure that the projects represent the highest level of humanities research and public engagement. The primary goal of the summer seminars is to advance humanities teaching. “The grant projects announced today represent the very best of humanities scholarship and programming,” said NEH Chairman William Adams in a press release announcing grant awards and offers in the month of July. “NEH is proud to support programs that illuminate the great ideas and events of our past, broaden access to our nation’s many cultural resources, and open up for us new ways of understanding the world in which we live.”
International Hoops
Senior men’s basketball player Tanner Brooks helped out at a free, five-day basketball camp for underprivileged children in Banica, Dominican Republic this past summer. The Seahawk men’s and women’s basketball teams open up the new campaign on November 13-15 with the three-day, eight-team First Annual Dan Greene Memorial Invitational.
Faculty/Student
More information about the seminar can be found at http://grants.smcm.edu/ neh-summer-seminar-2016/.
Global Scholars Program Announced
Accomplishments
Todd Eberly (associate professor of political science and public policy) was invited by the Governor’s Office to testify before the Maryland Redistricting Reform Commission. He testified on Sept. 29. Read Eberly’s testimony, published on Maryland Reporter, at bit.ly/1Ghm8c5. Eberly
Katy Arnett (associate professor of educational studies) was co-senior author of “Point de Connexions” (Pearson Education Canada, May 2015), an inclusive, differentiated textbook program for teaching French at the Grade 9 level in Ontario, which is also expected to be used in many French Second Language programs across Canada. This program aligns with principles outlined in her previously published book, “Languages for All: How to Support and Challenge Students in a Second Language Arnett Classroom” (Pearson Education Canada, 2013). Arnett has been involved with the series since 2013; all of the student, teacher, and electronic resources for the program become available by the end of this year.
St. Mary’s announced the Global Scholars Program at Seahawk Saturday on October 24. Designed to increase knowledge about globalization from a multidisciplinary and experiential perspective, this program will pair a special First Year Seminar, offered
in Fall 2016, with a study tour to the Republic of Senegal, West Africa, in January 2017. Participating students will be chosen from the entering Class of 2020 via a competitive application process.
Museum Studies Students Developing Interpretive Displays for New Anne Arundel Hall Three students are developing interpretive displays for the new Anne Arundel Hall as an independent study course with Professor of Anthropology Julie King. The designer of both the lobby exhibit and the Blackistone Room display is Hannah Dickmyer ’16. She is working with College-approved colors and fabrics to choose materials and colors for the exhibits. Carson Fehner ’16 is researching and writing the content for the lobby display. It will include a large panel, an object case, and a media panel and will encapsulate the history of the Anne Arundel location/facility, from 1948 through today. Lina Mann ‘16 is developing for the Blackistone Room the storylines through time of the colonists to St. Mary’s City and the Native Americans they encountered. She is aiming to show how
their narratives of the colony’s settlement contrast on many points. What one group saw as arrival, for example, the other came to understand as invasion and will encapsulate the history of the Anne Arundel location/facility, from 1948 through today. Lina Mann ‘16 is developing for the
Blackistone Room the storylines through time of the colonists to St. Mary’s City and the Native Americans they encountered. She is aiming to show how their narratives of the colony’s settlement contrast on many points. What one group saw as arrival, for example, the other came to understand as invasion.
Thomas M. Barrett (professor of history) has just published “Desiring the Soviet Woman: Tatiana Romanova and From Russia with Love,” in Lisa Funnell, ed., For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond (Wallflower Press, 2015).
Nathan Foster (assistant professor of psychology) has published the article “Is awareness of the ability to forget (or remember) critical for demonstrating directed forgetting?” in the Journal of Memory and Language.
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Pamela S. Mertz (associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry) and Craig Streu (assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry) recently published the article “Writing Throughout the Biochemistry Curriculum: Synergistic Inquiry-Based Writing Projects for Biochemistry Students” in the journal Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education.
In October, eight student staff members presented at the Mid-Atlantic Association of University and Housing Officers’ annual Student Staff Live-In Workshop. The students, and the titles of their presentations, were Gracey Montgomery, Esteban Caballero, and David Reynoso (“Own Up! Accountability in Student Leadership”); Jennifer Keller and Taylor Engdahl (“How to Recognize and Combat Imposter Syndrome”); Julia Singleton and Pat McCann (“Taking Care of Yourself After Responding to a Crisis”); and Sarah Stayer (“Title IX and You: Tying Title IX to the Student Staff Experience”). The Board of Directors of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology (AACS) recognized Megan Klohr ’18 for her outstanding contribution to the recent AACS Annual Meeting in Montgomery, Ala. In a letter to SMCM’s acting provost and dean of faculty, the AACS Board of Directors wrote, “Klohr demonstrated the highest level of personal and professional ability in her new role as Undergraduate Liaison to the AACS Board.”
Klohr
Welcome … Welcome to Tressa Setlak, director of public safety, who joins St. Mary’s College on November 2. Setlak brings over 25 years of experience in campus safety and law enforcement, having previously served at Cabrini College and Harrisburg Area Community College. Setlak