Flexibility and attractors in context: family emotion socialization patterns and children's emotion regulation in late childhood.

Familial emotion socialization practices relate to children's emotion regulation (ER) skills in late childhood, however, we have more to learn about how the context and structure of these interactions relates to individual differences in children's ER. The present study examined flexibility and attractors in family emotion socialization patterns in three different conversational contexts and their relation to ER in 8-12 year olds. Flexibility was defined as dispersion across the repertoire of discrete emotion words and emotion socialization functions (emotion coaching, dismissing, and elaboration) in family conversation, whereas attractors were defined as the average duration per visit to each of these three emotion socialization functions using state space grid analysis.