Phd in PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE

Thesis title: “Parental Emotion Socialization and Children’s Socio-Emotional Adjustment”.

The present dissertation explores the dynamics of parental emotional socialization (PES) and its impact on children's emotional and behavioral development across different cultural contexts. Through the analysis of the structure of the Emotion as a Child (EAC) scale and the examination of the relationships between parental strategies and child adaptation, this work contributes to the understanding of the role of emotional socialization in emotion regulation and psychological development, also in the context of intervention programs such as V-Robotator. The first study focuses on validating the Emotion as a Child (EAC) scale (Magai, 1997), examining how parents in Italy and Colombia respond to their children's anger and sadness. Despite widespread use in international research to measure PES (Eisenberg et al., 1998), the scale had not been properly validated in different cultural contexts. The study hypothesizes that confirmatory factor analysis will reveal two distinct factors—supportive and unsupportive parenting practices—across both emotions, offering cross-cultural validation for the scale. The second study investigates the relationship between PES and children's socio-emotional adjustment. It is hypothesized that children whose parents use more unsupportive emotional socialization strategies will exhibit higher levels of internalizing and externalizing problems. The study emphasizes the association between less supportive parental strategies and difficulties in children's emotional regulation and behavioral adaptation. Finally, the third study examines the moderating role of PES in the effectiveness of the V-Robotator intervention program, which aims to enhance children's socio-emotional competencies through group activities facilitated by a virtual agent. It is hypothesized that children from less supportive family environments will benefit more from the intervention, supporting the differential plasticity theory and highlighting the potential of targeted interventions for vulnerable children.