Psychological Bulletin Copyright 1991 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

1991, Vol.110, No. 1,3-25 0033-2909/91/S3.00

The Affective Organization of Parenting:

Adaptive and Maladaptative Processes

Theodore Dix
Department of Human Ecology
University of Texas at Austin

This article presents a 3-component model of parenting that places emotion at the heart of parental
competence. The model emphasizes (a) child, parent, and contextual factors that activate parents'
emotions; (b) orienting, organizing, and motivating effects that emotions have on parenting once
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aroused; and (c) processes parents use to understand and control emotions. Emotions are vital to
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effective parenting. When invested in the interests of children, emotions organize sensitive, respon-
sive parenting. Emotions undermine parenting, however, when they are too weak, too strong, or
poorly matched to child rearing tasks. In harmonious relationships, emotions are, on average,
positive because parents manage interactions so that children's and parents' concerns are pro-
moted. In distressed relationships, chronic negative emotion is both a cause and a consequence of
interactions that undermine parents' concerns and children's development.

Parenting is an emotional experience. Raising children in-
volves more joy, affection, anger, and worry than do most other
endeavors. Few researchers doubt that these emotions are im-
portant to parenting. Negative emotions are thought to pro-
mote insensitive, abusive, and coercive parenting (Ainsworth,
Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Lahey, Conger, Atkenson, &
Treiber, 1984; Patterson, 1982; Vasta, 1982). Positive emotions
are thought to promote patient, sensitive care; early parent-
child bonding; and parents' willingness to teach, comfort, and
encourage their children (e.g., Ainsworth et al., 1978; Belsky,
1984). Yet, the role that emotions play in parenting is poorly
understood. Little is known about the emotions parents com-
monly experience, about when and why they occur, or about
their consequences for parenting once aroused. This article ex-
amines these issues. A brief survey of research related to emo-
tion and parenting provides a context for a model that delin-
eates how parents' emotions are aroused and how they organize
parenting. The model places emotion at the heart of both effec-
tive and ineffective parenting.
Current Status of Research on Affect in Parenting
Research supports four general conclusions about emotion
and parenting. First, strong emotion is a daily concomitant of
parenting. Conflictual interactions between parents and chil-
dren occur from 3'/2 to 15 times an hour in families with young
children (Dunn & Munn, 1985; Fawl, 1963; Lee & Bates, 1985;
Minton, Kagan, & Levine, 1971; Patterson, 1976,1980) and are
even more frequent in families with children who are sick, dis-
abled, or aggressive (Mednick & McNiel, 1968; Patterson,
I thank George Holden, Deborah Jacobvitz, Ted Huston, and Har-
old Grotevant for comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Theodore Dix, Department of Human Ecology, Mary Gearing Hall,
University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712-1097.
1982). Even average parents report high levels of anger with
their children, the need to engage in techniques to control their
anger, and fear that they will at some time lose control and
harm their children (Frude & Goss, 1979; see also Stolz, 1967).
Strong emotion is also apparent in reports showing high rates of
depression among mothers of young children (Patterson, 1980)
and high rates of violence in American households, both be-
tween parent and child and between husband and wife (Gelles
& Straus, 1979; Parke & Slaby, 1983). Parents' positive emotions
are even more common than their negative emotions. Parents
report 2'/2 times as many positive as negative interactions with
their children (Jersild, Woodyard, & del Solar, 1949). Thus, al-
though it hardly needs documenting, there is evidence that par-
ents experience and express considerable emotion during child
rearing.
Second, when conceptualized as stable individual-difference
variables, parents' emotions reflect the quality of the caregiving
environment. Parental warmth consistently predicts favorable
developmental outcomes for children, whereas parental hostil-
ity consistently predicts unfavorable developmental outcomes
for children (for reviews see Grusec & Lytton, 1988; Maccoby,
1980; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). This is true during both in-
fancy (e.g., Ainsworth et al, 1978; Sroufe, 1979) and childhood
(eg, Hoffman & Saltzstein, 1967) and in both average families
(e.g, Baumrind, 1967; Coopersmith, 1967) and dysfunctional
families (Hann, Osofsky, & Carter, 1989; Radke-Yarrow, 1990;
Radke-Yarrow, Richters, & Wilson, 1988). Even transient nega-
tive emotions between adults cause distress and aggression in
infants and young children (Cohn &Tronick, 1983; Cummings,
lannotti, & Zahn-Waxler, 1985). Thus, there is considerable evi-
dence that the caregiving environment is more favorable for
children the more positive the emotions parents experience and
express.
Third, parents' occupations, marital relations, and other
stresses and supports influence the quality of parenting be-
cause they influence the emotions parents experience with chil-
 THEODORE DJX
dren. Parents experiencing high levels of stress (Crnic, Green-
berg, Ragozin. Robinson, & Basham, 1983; Emery; 1982; Heth-
erington, Cox, &Cox, 1978; Jouriles, Barling, & O"Leary, 1987;
Mash, Johnston, & Kovitz, 1983; McLoyd, 1990; Passman &
Mulherin, 1977; Weinraub & Wolf, 1983; Zussman, 1980)orlow
levels of social support (Belsky, 1984; Colletta, 1979; Pascoe,
Loda, Jeffries, & Hasp, 1981; Unger & Wandersman, 1988;
Weinraub & Wolf, 1983) show significant parenting deficits,
notably harsh and erratic discipline. Researchers assume that
these deficits are due in part to the impact that stress and sup-
port have on parents' emotions (e.g, Belsky, 1984; Belsky &
Vondra, 1989; Cochran & Brassard, 1979; Conger, McCarty,
Yang, Lahey, & Kropp, 1984; Crnic et al, 1983; Crockenberg,
1983; Hetherington & Camara, 1984; McLoyd, 1990; Patterson,
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1982; Unger & Wandersman, 1988; Wahler & Dumas, 1989).
Substantial correlations in feet are present between stress and
negative emotion (L, A. Clark & Watson, 1988; Eckenrode,
1984; Lewinsohn & Libet, 1972; Riley & Eckenrode, 1986;
Stone, 1981; Stone & Neale, 1984) and between supports and
positive emotion (Barrera, 1988; Pagel & Becker, 1987; Riley &
Eckenrode, 1986). Furthermore, the impact that significant life
events have depends on affective aspects of reactions to those
events more than on the occurrence of the events per se {Sara-
son, Shearin, Pierce, &Sarason, 1987; Wolfe, 1985). Thus, there
is growing evidence that parents' emotions play an important
role in how significant events in parents' lives influence parent-
ing and children.
Fourth, chronic and intense negative emotion in parents is a
sign of family dysfunction. It is conspicuous in what some have
called distressed families: families experiencing serious devel-
opmental or interactional problems. These include families
with difficult children (e.g, premature infants, noncompliant
children) or dysfunctional parents (e.g, abusive, neglectful, de-
pressed, or teenage parents), as well as families experiencing
high stress (e.g, poverty, divorce). Negative emotion is promi-
nent, for example, in the parenting of abusive mothers (Lahey et
al., 1984; Susman, Trickett, lannotti, Hollenbeck, & Zahn-
Waxler, 1985; Trickett & Kuczynski, 1986; Wolfe, 1985); de-
pressed mothers (Forehand, McCombs, & Brody, 1987; Long-
fellow, Zelkowitz, & Saunders, 1982; Panaccione & Wahler,
1986; RadkeYarrow, 1990; Susman et al, 1985; Weissman &
Paykel, 1974); mothers of aggressive boys (Patterson, 1982);
teenage mothers (Hann et al., 1989); mothers of premature in-
fants (Goldberg, Brachfeld, & DiVitto, 1980); and mothers liv-
ing in poverty (McLoyd, 1990). Most researchers assume that
these negative emotions both reflect dysfunctional interaction
patterns and contribute to the deficits characteristic of parent-
ing in these families.
Thus, perhaps more than any other single variable, parents'
emotions reflect the health of parent-child relationships. They
are barometers for the quality of parenting, the developmental
outcomes that are likely for children, and the impact that envi-
ronmental stresses and supports are having on the family. \et,
the reasons for this are poorly understood. Conceptions of par-
ents' emotions have been so undifferentiated that the specific
processes responsible for their relations with other variables
have not been adequately studied. Because parents' emotions
have been considered stable traits, researchers have seldom ex-
amined what causes them, how and why they change, or specifi-
cally how they influence parenting. Furthermore, an emphasis
on distressed families has led to views of negative emotion that
place undue emphasis on its disorganizing and dysregulatory
effects. Basic emotion research, and some studies of parenting
as well (e.g., Johnson & McGiJlicuddy-Delisi, 1983; Zahn-
Waxler, Radke-%rrow, & King, 1979), have suggested that nega-
tive emotions may be adaptive for parenting if they are not
excessive or chronic. In addition, research often fails to distin-
guish clearly among emotions, attitudes, and behaviors. It is
unclear, therefore, to what extent affective processes, rather
than cognitive or behavioral processes, are responsible for the
ineffective parenting occurring in distressed families. Finally,
and most important, conceptions of affective processes in par-
enting are post hoc, account for only isolated pieces of data,
discriminate poorly among kinds of positive and negative emo-
tion, and are uninformed by basic research on emotion. In
other words, no systematic model or framework exists for un-
derstanding emotion's role in parenting.
A Model for Understanding Affective
Processes in Parenting
Although conceptions of affective processes have remained
undeveloped in the literature on parenting, they have flour-
ished in recent research in experimental and social psychology.
When applied to parenting, this work leads to a model that can
account for when and why parents experience emotions and,
once aroused, how emotions aher parenting. It is a model that
clarifies why parents' emotions are fused with the quality of
parenting and the development of children.
Overview of Affective Processes: Activation,
Engagement, and Regulation
Emotion researchers have emphasized that emotions are
adaptative, that they are central to the regulation of human
behavior (e.g, Campos, Barrett, Lamb, Goldsmith, & Stenberg,
1983; Emde, 1984; Frrjda, 1986; Izard, 1977; Lazarus & Folk-
man, 1984; Livesey, 1986; Plutchik, 1980; Scherer, 1984; Tom-
kins, 1982). Specifically, affective processes are considered evo-
lutionary mechanisms by which organisms identify events of
significance and through which adaptive responses to those
events are mobilized and coordinated. Frijda (1986) has written
"Emotions and feelings. . . constitute the organism's concern
satisfaction system. They serve the useful function of watching,
guarding, and satisfying the individual's concerns and realign-
ing action toward satisfaction when disturbed" (p. 371). Three
sets of processes, depicted in Figure 1, comprise the affective
system: activation, engagement, and regulation.
Activation processes precipitate emotion. They determine
when emotion will occur, which emotion will occur, and how
strongly it will be activated. Although some emotional re-
sponses are innate (e-g., reactions to noxious noises or loss of
support) or can occur with little cognitive analysis (see Bargh,
1988; Zajonc, 1980), cognition is an important determinant of a
large percentage of human emotions. Specifically, emotions re-
flect individuals' appraisals of the benefit or harm inherent in
immediate events (Frijda, 1986; Izard, 1984; Lazarus & Folk-
man, 1984; Mandler, 1984; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988;
Roseman, 1984). Frijda (1986) has written "Emotion . . . re-
sults from monitoring whether events permit, or interfere with,
 THE AFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF PARENTING
REGULATION
ACTIVATION
If
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Figure 1. A model of affective processes in parenting.
concern satisfaction" (p. 460). In general, events that people
think interfere with their plans or concerns elicit negative emo-
tion, whereas events they think promote their plans or concerns
elicit positive emotion (Frijda, 1986; Kelley, 1984; Lazarus &
Folkman, 1984; Mandler, 1984).
Which specific positive or negative emotion is activated—
whether it is, for example, anger or sadness—depends on how
people conceptualize the outcomes, obstacles, and supports
present in events. Considerable theory and data have suggested
that specific emotions reflect specific appraisals of events
(Frijda, 1986; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Ortony et al, 1988;
Kelley, 1984; Roseman, 1984; Weiner & Graham, 1984). These
appraisals involve analysis of the beneficial or harmful conse-
quences likely to occur, of their importance, of the role that
various persons played in making them happen, and of the
options and resources one has to deal with them. Pride, for
example, reflects an appraisal that someone with whom one is
closely associated has accomplished something significant;
anger reflects an appraisal that someone is responsible for frus-
trating a significant goal; and fear reflects an appraisal that a
significant negative outcome over which one has little control is
imminent. Thus, parents' emotions depend on the concerns
they are trying to promote, their appraisals of whether and why
those concerns are being promoted or frustrated, and their ap-
praisals of the options and resources available to ensure that
their concerns are promoted.
Once activated, emotions transform people's orientations to-
ward the environment. A second set of processes, which I call
engagement processes, is set in motion once affect is aroused
and serves to establish emotion-specific orientations toward
events. Specifically, emotions activate, orient, and organize
adaptive processes. They are characterized by changes in cogni-
ENGAGEMENT
Motivation
Cognition
Expressive Behavior
Behavioral Tendencies
tion, physiology, motivation, subjective feeling states, behav-
ioral readiness, and facial and vocal expression. These changes
prepare people to perceive and evaluate particular features of
events (cognition), activate motives to seek particular outcomes
(motivation), communicate to others the person's affective
stance (expressive behavior), and prepare response tendencies
likely to be needed (behavioral inclinations; Frijda, 1986; Izard,
1984; Kelley, 1984; Plutchik, 1980; Scherer, 1984). The specific
form emotional engagement takes depends on which emotion is
activated and on how strongly. Fear, for example, prepares peo-
ple to perceive and avoid threat, whereas anger prepares people
to perceive and remove obstruction. Even mild affect initiates
some change in outlook and inclination.
A third set of affective processes helps people understand
and control emotions and their expression; Frijda (1986) has
referred to them as regulation processes. Humans do not simply
feel and express emotions reflexively; they control emotions
and their expression. They try to understand what they are
feeling and why, they evaluate how others will react to particular
emotional behaviors, and they initiate thoughts and actions to
augment or inhibit emotions and their expression (Frijda, 1986;
Hochschild, 1979; Lazarus, 1975). Regulation processes help
people promote desirable emotions, suppress or cope with un-
desirable emotions, and conceal emotions, both positive and
negative, that threaten to undermine their concerns.
Specific Proposals for an Affective Model of Parenting
Emotion Activation in Parents
This view of how affect regulates behavior has important
implications for parenting. Consider five typical interactions in
which emotion is aroused in parents:
 THEODORE DIX
Case 1. A father is unable to comfort his baby daughter. He
feels anger and frustration because her cries are aversive, em-
pathic distress because she is so unhappy, and worry because he
fears she might be seriously ill.
Case 2. Late for an important appointment at work, a
mother tells her son to get his teeth brushed quickly and to put
on his shoes. Moments later she becomes angry when she finds
him, instead, looking at a book.
Case 3. A father places his 8-month-old daughter in a baby
swing at the playground and sets the swing in motion. He feels
warmth and joy as the baby's face lights up and her arms wave
with excitement.
Case 4. At dinner a sister teases her brother, saying he is too
fat to have dessert. Exasperated, the father says, "How many
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times do I have to tell you to leave your brother alone?"
Case 5. A mother and her son are playing a board game.
With one roll of the dice the boy's prospects improve. He laughs
and in jest taunts his mother as he moves his piece around the
board. Pleased that her son is so excited, the mother feigns grief
and pledges revenge. When she rolls the dice, she is in further
trouble and again feigns anguish and disbelief. She feels warmth
and empathic pleasure as the boy laughs and begins dancing
around the room.
In each case emotion is activated because the outcomes of
these interactions matter to parents. They are important to
goals, values, plans, and other concerns that parents very much
want to promote. Emotion research implies that parents'emo-
tions are activated when outcomes occur that are relevant to signif-
icant concerns they have in an interaction. These concerns are
numerous and varied. They include plans to get things done
(e.g., Case 2, to get the child ready to leave) and values about how
children should act (e.g., Case 4, children should be sensitive to
others). They include both the child rearing goals emphasized
in socialization research (e.g, Case 4, children should be sensi-
tive to others) and the self-oriented goals that have little to do
with children or with parents' role as parents (e.g, Case 2, to get
to a business appointment). They include empathic concerns as
well. Because parents want their children to be happy and with-
out pain, they feel emotions on the basis of their children's
reactions to events (e.g., Case 3, the baby's joy in the swing).
Finally, some stimuli, such as infants' smiles or children's loud
shrieking, elicit emotion because they are inherently painful,
attractive, or disagreeable (e.g. Case 1, a crying baby). Like
Frijda (1986), I use the term concerns to refer in general to all of
the outcomes that parents value and wish to promote. Parents
bring innumerable concerns to interactions with children. Of-
ten, multiple concerns are relevant to the same interaction (e.g.
Case 1). Although there may be times when parents are without
concerns and emotions, this is probably uncommon. Usually
parents care which outcomes occur, even if only slightly; their
concerns and the affects, feelings, or emotions that accompany
them probably contribute to most parent-child interactions (no
distinctions among affects, feelings, and emotions are made
here).
This view of emotion activation is consistent with goal-regu-
lation models of behavior (e.g., Kuhl & Beckmann, 1985; G. A.
Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960; Schank & Abelson, 1977;
see Pervin, 1989). It suggests that (a) during interactions with
children, parents often seek to promote particular concerns or
outcomes; (b) to promote those concerns, parents initiate plans
or sequences of behavior; (c) they continually appraise events so
that they have sufficient understanding and control to promote
their concerns effectively; and (d) they adjust their behavior on
the basis of appraisals of whether their concerns are being met.
Thus, an affective model emphasizes that parenting is a process
of formulating, enacting, evaluating, and maintaining or chang-
ing interaction plans so that parents' concerns are effectively
promoted. Although this view is decidedly cognitive, it is cogni-
tion in the service of affect. Parents formulate plans and ap-
praise behavior to ensure that outcomes that matter to them
occur. Furthermore, this cognition need not be rational, deliber-
ate, or conscious. Quite the contrary, recent research on cogni-
tion has suggested that the purposes and appraisals that under-
lie emotion are probably in large part automatic (eg, Bargh,
1988; Isen & Diamond, 1989; Schneider&Shiffrin, 1977), mind-
less (e.g, Kelley, 1979; Langer, 1978), irrational (Nisbett & Ross,
1980), or unconscious (e.g, Mandler, 1988; Nisbett & Wilson,
1977).
Because the behaviors and outcomes of parents and children
are interdependent (see Kelley, 1979; Kelley & Thibaut, 1978),
whether parents' concerns are promoted often depends on their
children. The emotions parents experience depend on whether
their concerns and behaviors are compatible with the concerns
and behaviors of their children (Maccoby & Martin, 1983; see
also Kelley, 1979; Peterson, 1989; Pruitt & Rubin, 1986). When
concerns and behaviors are compatible, harmonious interac-
tion is straightforward. Parents and children work to support
the plans and concerns they share; positive affect is therefore
likely. Both, for example, seek to promote the child's happiness
and involvement at the playground (Case 3) and during the
board game (Case 5). When their concerns and behaviors are
incompatible, however, conflict and negative affect become
likely. The child wants to look at a book, but the parent wants
the child to get ready to go (Case 2). The sister wants to taunt
her brother, but the parent wants her instead to be sensitive to
his feelings (Case 4). Because parents' concerns vary from mo-
ment to moment, the same child behavior can be compatible
with parental concerns on one occasion but incompatible on
another. A child's gleeful play is joyous to a parent trying to
faciliate play, but can be irritating to a parent trying to get the
child to bed.
The importance of compatibility implies that parents' emo-
tions will depend on processes and variables that create compat-
ible interactions and resolve incompatible ones. Parents experi-
ence less negative and more positive emotion if they coordinate
interactions with children such that mutually satisfactory behav-
iors and outcomes occur (see Goldberg, 1977; Kelley, 1979,
1984). Much of the time this is not difficult. Parents of infants
sit with them and play with toys. When the infant gets bored,
they take a walk. On returning, they eat and then resume play.
Infant and parent behaviors are compatible during these activi-
ties because they are activities parents initiate explicitly to ob-
tain outcomes infants want. Parent and child concerns will typi-
cally be compatible if parents adopt such empathic strategies: if
they cooperate with children to seek outcomes children want
(see Dix, in press; KeEey, 1979). Particularly when children are
young and have limited control over their behavior, parents
 THE AFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF PARENTING
often will have to adopt children's concerns if plan compatibil-
ity is to be achieved (see, e.g., Eckerman & Didow, 1989).
Other interactions are more difficult. Against children's
wishes, parents want children to go to bed or to share their toys.
During these incompatible interactions, parents can create
compatibility if they successfully adopt cooperative strategies: if
they elicit cooperation from children to support parents' plans
and concerns. Because young children respond willingly to
many parental directives, parents can often elicit cooperation
simply by asking for it (Kuczynski & Kochanska, 1990; Rein-
gold, Cook, & Kolowitz, 1987). At other times, however, par-
ents must negotiate, compromise, convince, and frame events
in ways that make cooperative courses of action acceptable to
children. Particularly with older children, this should be more
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successful if parents can fall back on clear, reasonable, and
consistently applied rules for appropriate conduct.
Parents also can resolve incompatibility by using forceful
strategies: They can simply force children to enact behavior
compatible with their concerns. This does not yield willing co-
operation, but it is, of course, frequently necessary and com-
monly used. If children comply quickly and resist little, even
forceful influence techniques ought to result in little, if any,
negative affect in parents. Yet, because forceful strategies sup-
press children's wants, rather than reconcile them with parents'
wants, they will often result in greater resistance from children,
particularly when children value highly the outcomes parents
are denying them. Reliance on forceful strategies has the poten-
tial, therefore, to promote incompatible behavior from children
and, as a result, negative affect in parents. Over time, such strate-
gies can also undermine the advantages (e.g., companionship,
mutual support) inherent in cooperative interactions and rela-
tionships (Kelley, 1979; Peterson, 1989). In summary, parents'
emotions will depend on the strategies they adopt during inter-
actions with children. Negative affect is likely when parents fail
to adopt and promote children's concerns successfully, fail to
elicit cooperation from children to promote parents' concerns,
or fail to elicit quick and easy compliance with commands.
Simply using these strategies does not guarantee compatibil-
ity and positive emotion. Rather, strategies must be used suc-
cessfully, and this requires specific parenting skills. Concern
with emotion leads to an emphasis on parenting skills that pro-
mote mutual adaptation and coordination of parent and child
behavior. Emotion depends on the extent to which parents for-
mulate and select concerns that children can, and are willing to,
promote. Parents must have skill at selecting plans and concerns
that are likely to succeed. Parents who think that newborns
should sleep through the night, that toddlers should play inde-
pendently for long periods, or that young children should re-
main clean when playing outside are likely to become upset
when children are unable or unwilling to conform to these unre-
alistic goals. Consistent selection of plans and concerns that
ignore children's wants, needs, and abilities is likely to result in
high levels of incompatible child behavior and therefore nega-
tive parental emotion.
Parents' emotions also depend on their skill at eliciting from
children behaviors that allow parental plans and concerns to be
promoted. If parents lack skill at increasing children's ability or
willingness to cooperate—skills, for example, at communica-
tion, at event framing, at using contingencies, or at negotiation
—they will experience negative emotions when they are unable
to elicit child behaviors that enable their concerns to be pro-
moted. In coercive families, for example, when children violate
parental values or requests, parents admonish them, as many
parents would. But then the strategies and behaviors parents
invoke to elicit compatible behavior, whether they are coopera-
tive or forceful strategies, are unsuccessful. They meet with re-
sistance rather than compliance, and, as a result, lengthy con-
flicts imbued with negative emotion follow (Patterson, 1982).
Although the positive-negative valence of emotion depends
on the compatibility of parents' concerns and children's behav-
iors, which specific positive or negative emotion is activated de-
pends on parents' appraisals of why concern-promoting or violat-
ing behaviors are occurring and of how much control parents have
over getting their concerns met. Auger occurs when negative
events are seen to reflect the willful acts of another; dysphoria
occurs when desired outcomes do not occur and cannot be
controlled. Consider the emotions that might accompany an
acrimonious interaction between a mother and her aggressive
son. As she anticipates asking him to clean his room, she infers
that a coercive bout over which she has little control is about to
occur. She feels anxious. As the boy yells and verbally attacks
her, she perceives that without justification he is intentionally
preventing her concern from being promoted. She feels angry.
When he wins the battle of wills, the mother leaves, aware that
many of her hopes for her son may not occur and that she is
powerless to change that. She feels dysphoric. Note that distinct
emotions are associated with specific appraisals of the structure
of emotional events (see Frijda, 1986; Ortony et al, 1988; Rose-
man, 1984; Weiner & Graham, 1984). How strongly an emotion
occurs depends on inferences about the importance, stability,
generality, and controllability of the outcomes that induced it.
Negative emotions will be relatively strong when parents infer
that the concerns being blocked are important and that the
reasons they are being blocked are stable, general, and not
under parental control (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale,
1978; Weiner, 1979). Positive emotions should be strong when
parents infer that the concerns being promoted are important
and that the reasons they are being promoted are stable, gen-
eral, and under their control.
Over time, parents and children develop shared representations
of events, stable conceptions of each other, and interdependent
behavioral dispositions that determine the affective patterning
characteristic of their relationship (see Peterson, 1989; Kelley,
1979). In other words, the frequency and ease with which dyads
attain compatibility and resolve incompatibility depend on
their history, on which concerns are prominent in their rela-
tionship, and on the cognitive, affective, and behavioral disposi-
tions partners develop toward each other. Maccoby and her
colleagues (Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Parpal & Maccoby, 1985)
have proposed that children develop dispositions to accept or
resist parental influence, based in large part on whether par-
ents are sensitive and responsive to them. When parents are
involved, cooperative, and responsive, children are likely to
comply with parental directives; when parents are arbitrary, un-
cooperative, or punitive, children show high levels of noncom-
pliance (for a review, see Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Compara-
ble dispositions probably develop in parents. In effective dyads,
parents come to expect compliance from their children, to at-
 THEODORE DIX
tend and give weight to the concerns of their children, and to
compromise and comply often with children's wishes. In con-
trast, parents in coercive dyads come to expect noncompliance
from children. They think parent and child concerns cannot be
reconciled and that coercion, not cooperation, is necessary to
obtain the outcomes they seek. They will often fail to comply
with childrenls wishes unless coerced. Relationships differ, not
only in the extent to which partners promote each other's con-
cerns, but also in the kinds of concerns that are prominent in
the relationship. Relationships differ, therefore, in the kinds of
emotions partners experience. Concern with children's inten-
tional resistance makes anger prominent among parents of
noncompliant children, whereas concern with the viability of
children with medical problems makes anxiety and dysphoria
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prominent among parents' of premature infants. Interaction
histories and concerns predispose parents and children toward
or away from particular kinds of compatible exchanges, which
are characterized by positive emotion, and incompatible ex-
changes, which are characterized by negative emotion.
Of course, no parent-child relationship always functions co-
operatively Negative emotions are inevitable. To ensure that
children acquire important social values and behaviors, parents
must impose rules and require behaviors that conflict with chil-
drenls immediate wishes (Baumrind, 1967, 1971; Maccoby,
1980). It is the necessity of training socially appropriate disposi-
tions and competencies that makes the goal of simply minimiz-
ing immediate negative affect maladaptive for parents. Power
assertion, for example, induces immediate compliance in chil-
dren, but undermines their internalization of social values
(Hoffman, 1983; Lepper, 1983; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Per-
missive parenting avoids confrontations with children, but fails
to teach them mature behavior and, in the long run, is asso-
ciated with poor social competence (Baumrind, 1971; Maccoby
& Martin, 1983). Parents create and endure negative affect with
children to facilitate children's long-term competence and re-
ceptivity to parental influence. Furthermore, when excessive,
children's compliance with adults can indicate inadequate asser-
tiveness and autonomy (Kuczynski & Kochanska, 1990). None-
theless, there are important differences in the extent to which
parent-child dyads are cooperative, in how effectively dyads
resolve conflict, and therefore in the strength, frequency, and
chronicity of their positive and negative emotions.
Parents' Emotional Engagement
Once aroused, the emotions parents feel when children violate
or promote parental concerns influence processes basic to par-
ents' responses (\e^ engagement processes; see Figure 1). The
mother who is worried about being late for an appointment
(Case 2) is fundamentally different than the mother who is de-
lighted by her child's joy during a game (Case 4). The worried
mother is distracted from child-rearing tasks and focused in-
stead on tasks that must be completed if she is to be on time for
her appointment. She is monitoring time cues and appraising
her son's readiness to leave. She is motivated to get him ready to
go and is relatively unconcerned about whether he is enjoying
himself. Her quick movements and tense facial and vocal ex-
pression communicate apprehension. She appears prepared to
move quickly and to give orders. In contrast, the mother de-
lighted while playing a board game with her son is monitoring
his satisfaction with events and is looking for circumstances
about which she can engage him and joke with him. She is
motivated to get her son involved and to make him laugh. Her
smiles and feigned expressions of despair communicate enthusi-
asm and warmth. She appears prepared to play and communi-
cate.
Emotions engage and organize processes parents need to re-
spond effectively to children (cf. Dienstbier, 1978; Frijda, 1986;
Izard, Kagan, & Zajonc, 1984; Plutchik, 1980; Scherer & Ek-
man, 1984). Emotions influence cognition. They activate moni-
toring and attention, orient cognition toward concern-relevant
information, and channel or simplify decision processes. Emo-
tions alter motivation. They arouse motives to maintain or
change the child's immediate behavior; they impel and direct
parenting so that child behaviors that elicit positive emotion are
promoted and child behaviors that elicit negative emotion are
changed; they ensure that concern-relevant events and behav-
iors have priority. Emotions influence communication. They
activate changes in facial muscles, tones of voice, and other
bodily movements that indicate to children how parents feel
and are likely to act. Emotions also induce action readiness. At
a general level, they prime parents to approach or avoid chil-
dren and, at more specific levels, to comfort, protect, praise, or
criticize them. These changes profoundly influence how inter-
actions with children proceed.
Although emotions mobilize processes parents need to pro-
mote their concerns, they also can undermine parenting under
certain circumstances. Failures to activate emotion at particu-
lar times can lead to parenting that is poorly engaged, orga-
nized, or executed. A mother who feels little anger at her son's
failure to get ready as asked (see Case 2) may fail to communi-
cate her intentions and expectations clearly, to monitor his sub-
sequent progress adequately or to execute required actions with
sufficient speed and minimal distraction. An absence of joy
(see Case 5), similarly, can lead to parenting that is unresponsive
and unengaging. Emotions can also disrupt parenting if they
are particularly strong, especially negative emotions (see Frijda,
1986). Strong negative emotions interfere with thorough cogni-
tive appraisal, undermine parents' control of their emotions
and emotional behaviors, and induce motives to reduce nega-
tive emotions that interfere with sensitivity to children's needs
and perspectives. Disruptions of parenting that are due to
strong positive emotions may also occur, although they are al-
most certain to occur less often, to be less pronounced, and to
have consequences for children that are less detrimental. Emo-
tions also can disrupt parenting if they are poorly matched to
the parenting tasks at hand. Parents who bring emotion from
situations that do not involve children (e.g.. anger with a spouse)
into situations that do involve children (e.g., playing with a child)
often bring inclinations poorly matched to the child-rearing
tasks at hand (see Frijda, 1986). Anger, for example, promotes
the removal of obstruction; although appropriate during spou-
sal conflict, it may, if brought to a parent-child interaction,
interfere with empathic concern for the child's frustration or joy
for the child's accomplishments. Although positive emotions
can also be matched poorly to parenting tasks, such mis-
matches are probably less common and are certainly less de-
structive in their effects on children. In general, emotion gener-
 THE AFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF PARENTING
ated by self-oriented concerns should be more likely than emo-
tion generated by child-oriented concerns to undermine incli-
nations to respond to children's needs and interests. Insufficient
emotion, excessive emotion, and emotion poorly matched to
parenting tasks are important aspects of affective functioning
among distressed parents.
Parents' Regulation of Emotion
The impact that emotions have on parenting depends on how
parents understand and control them (Vasta, 1982; cf. Frijda,
1986; Hochschild, 1979; Lazarus, 1975; Masters & Carlson,
1984; Thoits, 1984). Parents are pleased to be feeling certain
emotions, but feel guilty about or frightened by others. To elicit
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infant attention, parents exaggerate expressions of positive
emotions; to ensure that toddlers are not frightened, parents
inhibit expressions of anxiety. Regulation processes control mo-
ment-to-moment changes in emotions and their expression so
that interactions with children actualize parents' concerns (see
Figure 1). Emotion regulation is important to controlling what
parents communicate to children and therefore what reactions
children are likely to have; to ensuring that emotions occur at
levels that promote organized responding and not at levels that
undermine reasonable parenting; and to ensuring that parent-
ing responses are not too positive, too negative, or badly timed.
Poorly functioning regulation processes may lead parents to
experience insufficient or excessive emotion or to express emo-
tion in ways that are detrimental to children and to the coordi-
nation of parent and child behavior.
Parents' Emotions in the Development of Children:
Affective Investments in Child Outcomes
Parents' emotions organize behavior within a unique rela-
tionship, one in which parents are responsible for the develop-
ment of their immature partners. Because effective parenting is
denned by the competence and adjustment of children, emo-
tions must organize parenting so that desirable outcomes occur,
not only for parents, but for children. To facilitate parenting,
emotions must promote plan selection and management that
over time benefit children. This implies, first, that parents must
monitor and understand the outcomes occurring to children.
Benefit to children is less likely if parents fail to notice how
events affect their children; fail to appraise why particular out-
comes to children occur; or fail to infer accurately what their
children want, need, and intend. Second, the specific concerns
and plans that organize parenting will have to be good for chil-
dren. Realizing parents' concerns, in other words, will have to
reduce children's frustration, promote children's sense of com-
petence, enable children to explore the environment, and teach
children values and social skills. Parents who consistently acti-
vate plans that confuse, frustrate, or constrain children, or that
fail to teach them values and social skills, are activating plans
that undermine development. Third, parents must place
enough value on the outcomes important for children for those
outcomes to have priority over countless others that benefit
parents more directly. After all, parent and child concerns are
frequently incompatible. A mother can be exhausted and rest-
ing when her child falls down and needs comforting. A father
9
can want to converse with a friend, yet his child can become
frustrated playing alone. Frequently parents must act to benefit
children even when it is difficult, is inconvenient, or requires
sacrifice. In other words, effective parenting often requires that
child-oriented concerns activate stronger emotion than parent-
oriented concerns (cf. Batson, 1987; Eisenberg et al, 1989). A
father's distress when his daughter becomes frustrated playing
alone must override his pleasure as he talks at that moment
with a friend. All three of these propositions imply that in the
context of socialization the affective system must be empathic: It
must be organized to a large extent around concerns and out-
comes related to children's well-being and development. It is par-
ents' affective investments in outcomes of benefit to children
that cause parents to adopt plans or concerns that meet chil-
drenls wants and needs (Dix, in press; Feshbach, 1987). Parents
whose emotions consistently promote self-concerns over child
concerns will often fail to act to their children's benefit.
Because children change dramatically with age, the child-re-
lated concerns that control parents' emotions are regularly
transformed. Parents rarely become angry when very young
children are selfish, but, as children mature, their selfishness
becomes irritating. Parents come to perceive it as a violation of
age-appropriate plans or values (Dix, Ruble, Grusec, & Nixon,
1986; Dix, Ruble, & Zambarano, 1989). Similar!); parents feel
proud when toddlers first walk, but a few months later they take
walking for granted, it no longer elicits positive affect. Parents'
emotions indicate which child behaviors matter to them and
which behaviors they will exert pressure to promote or change.
When parents' emotions become tied to developmental change
in children, they help push development forward.
Summary of the Model
An affective model emphasizes what some have called irans-
actional processes: the coordinations and mutual adaptations
parents and children make to each other so that outcomes each
values will occur (Bugental & Shennum, 1984; Field, Healy,
Goldstein, & Guthertz, 1990; Sameroff & Chandler, 1975;
Schaffer & Crook, 1979; Westerman, 1990). Emotions are tied
to these outcomes. It is because parents care deeply about
whether certain outcomes occur, to both themselves and their
children, that they organize parenting to promote those out-
comes. Furthermore, because their task is to facilitate develop-
ment, they must care about and organize parenting around
achieving outcomes of benefit to children. When outcomes
beneficial to children matter to parents, emotion activation,
engagement, and regulation ensure that those outcomes occur,
even when they are incompatible with outcomes that benefit
parents directly. Relationships characterized by high negative
emotion and low positive emotion may reflect the inability of
dyads, because of complex individual and contextual factors, to
feel empathic emotions and to coordinate interactions in ways
that are satisfactory to both parent and child.
Research on Parenting Relevant to Affective Processes
Considerable research on parenting can be understood in
terms of the activation, engagement, and regulation of emotion
with children. I now review what is known about these compo-
 10 THEODORE DIX
nents of emotion as they function in parent-child interactions.
Although research in this area is not plentiful, available evi-
dence, most of it from studies of distressed parents, is generally
consistent with the model presented here.
Emotion Activation: Significant Events
and Their Appraisal
Parents' Concerns and Their Appraisal:
Subjective Determinants of Emotion
For emotion to occur, parents must perceive children's behav-
ior as either contrary to or enhancing of their concerns (see
activation, Figure 1). Prominent conceptions of parenting em-
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phasize that parent-child conflict often occurs, not because
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
children's behavior is objectively problematic, but because par-
ents perceive children's behavior to be inconsistent with paren-
tal goals or expectations (Bell & Harper, 1977; Emmerich, 1969;
Goldberg, 1977; Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Thomas & Chess,
1977). Researchers have recognized that parents differ with re-
gard to the child behaviors they think are laudible or problem-
atic. \et, because parents' goals and values typically are concep-
tualized as general ideologies, and not as concerns within mo-
ments of interaction, little is known about what specific
outcomes parents typically try to promote and how they select
and appraise them. Available research falls into three catego-
ries: (a) parents' selection of concerns and plans, (b) parents'
appraisals of why their concerns and plans are being promoted
or violated, and (c) parents' appraisals of the resources and op-
tions available to realize their concerns and plans.
Selection of goals, plans, and expectations. There is emerging
evidence that distressed parents experience high negative affect
and low positive affect because they select interactional con-
cerns that are unrealistic and that children are unable or unwill-
ing to promote. For example, both abusive and depressed
mothers expect more mature behavior from children than do
comparison mothers (Azar, Robinson, Hekimian, & Twenty-
man, 1984; Davenport, Adland, Gold, & Goodwin, 1979;
Vasta, 1982; Zelkowitz, 1982). Abusive mothers, for example,
expect even very young children to take responsibility for child
care with younger brothers and sisters (Azar et al., 1984). Abu-
sive mothers may become irritated with children more often
than do other mothers because their unrealistic expectations
are more often violated. Teenage mothers too have unrealistic
expectations of their infants (De Lissovoy, 1973), and these ex-
pectations appear to influence parents' emotions during child
rearing: Teenage mothers with poor knowledge of development
are more negative with their infants than are teenage mothers
with good knowledge of development (Fry, 1985), presumably
because poor knowledge leads mothers to expect child behav-
iors that are unlikely to occur. Thus, in several distressed
groups, unrealistic expectations of children appear to promote
negative emotion.
One source of unrealistic expectations may be parents' fail-
ures to adopt child-oriented, or empathic, concerns. Parents
ought to have difficulty realizing their concerns and expecta-
tions—and thus will experience negative emotion—if they con-
sistently expect young children to adjust to parental plans and
concerns, rather than parents adjusting to children's plans and
concerns. Consistent with this hypothesis, mothers from some
distressed groups appear oriented toward self-concerns more,
and child concerns less, than are comparison mothers. Teenage
mothers who expect their infants to give them love and self-re-
spect are more negative and controlling, and less positive and
reciprocal, than are teenage mothers whose expectations of in-
fants are less self-oriented (Fry, 1985). Similarly, compared with
mothers who develop secure attachments with their infants,
mothers who development insecure attachments express more
negative affect, are less empathic, are less responsive to infants'
expressions of need, and are focused more on their own
thoughts and feelings than on the needs of the baby (Ainsworth
et al., 1978). They regularly become irritated when their infants
interfere with their self-oriented concerns. Similarly, depressed
mothers have been characterized as self-preoccupied, unable to
respond to the needs of their children, and uninvolved in their
children's ongoing behavior (Downey & Coyne, 1990; Susman
et al., 1985; Weissman & Paykel, 1974). Depressed mothers
comply less with children's wants and respond in ways that are
less contingent on children's behavior (Bettes, 1988; Cox, Puck-
ering, Pound, & Mills, 1987; Kochanska, Kuczynski, Radke-
Yarrow, & Welch, 1987). Approximately 40% of depressed
mothers are intrusive: They ignore the current state of the in-
fant and thereby elicit infant protest and gaze avoidance (Field
et al., 1990). Abusive mothers also show greater self-focus and
less child focus than do other mothers (Crittenden, 1981) and
score lower on measures of empathy (Feshbach, 1989; Le-
tourneau, 1981). In each of these distressed groups, mothers
may experience high levels of negative affect because they acti-
vate large numbers of self-oriented concerns that children are
unwilling or unable to promote (cf. Eisenberg et al, 1989).
"^r^Appmisals of ongoing success and failure. Consistent with
basic research on emotional appraisals (Abramson et ah, 1978;
Ortony et al, 1988; Weiner & Graham, 1984), parents' emotions
depend on their attributions about why children are promoting
or violating parents' concerns. Specifically, how upset parents
become with children who misbehave depends on inferences
parents make about children's intentions and children's control
over negative behavior (Dix & Grusec, 1985). Mothers are more
upset when they think that children understand, intend, and
have control over negative behavior and that negative acts, there-
fore, reflect negative personality dispositions in the child (Dix
& Lochman, 1990; Dix & Reinhold, 1991; Dix et al., 1986,
1989). Because childrenls control over their behavior is central
to these attributions, mothers' emotions depend on the age of
noncompliant children. For the same misdeed, mothers be-
come more upset with older, more competent children than
with younger, less competent children (Dix et al, 1986,1989).
They are also more upset by simple misdeeds—acts children
could avoid given only elementary social skill—than by com-
plex misdeeds—acts children could avoid only with advanced
social skill (Dix et al, 1989). Even small changes in the timing of
children's behavior can alter parents' emotional reactions if
those changes alter parents' appraisals of why negative acts oc-
curred. Mothers become more upset when children disobey
immediately than when 12s elapse between a mother's request
and a child's failure to comply (Dix & Reinhold, 1991). This
occurs because mothers infer that delayed disobedience could
be due to such benign causes as children's distractibility, forget-
 THE AFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF PARENTING
fulness, or lack of self-control. Mothers perceive that immedi-
ate disobedience, in contrast, is due to negative intentions and
dispositions in children. In addition, mothers are less upset
with children if they think that poor parenting or some other
external constraint influenced the child to act negatively (Dix &
Lochman, 1990; Dix et al, 1986). Finally attributions that pro-
mote negative affect depend on mothers' ideologies about chil-
dren and child rearing. Mothers with authoritarian ideologies
are more likely to become upset with children than are non-
authoritarian mothers because they are more likely to think
that children understand and have control over their negative
behavior (Dix & Reinhold, 1991; Dix et al, 1989). Thus, during
discipline, when anger is probably the central emotion, parents'
negative affect depends on their use of immediate cues, stored
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
information about children, and implicit theories of develop-
ment to infer whether children have intended and are responsi-
ble for negative behavior. There has been virtually no research
on the appraisal processes underlying anxiety, sadness, happi-
ness, and other parental emotions central in nondiscipline con-
texts.
Parents from distressed families appear to experience high
levels of negative emotion in part because of how they appraise
their children's behavior. Compared with average mothers, both
abusive mothers and mothers of aggressive boys attribute chil-
dren's negative behavior more often to negative motives and
dispositions and children's positive behavior less often to posi-
tive motives and dispositions (Bauer & Twentyman, 1985; Dix
& Lochman, 1990; Larrance & Twentyman, 1983; see also Pat-
terson, 1982). This is true whether the children about whom
attributions are made are the mothers' own or are strangers.
Similarly, compared with nondepressed mothers, depressed
mothers perceive their children's behavior to be more aversive
and maladjusted, even at times when there are no apparent
differences in the actual behavior of their children (Brody &
Forehand, 1988; Greist, Wells, & Forehand, 1979; Panaccione
& Wahler, 1986; Rickard, Forehand, Wells, Greist, & McMa-
hon, 1981; Rogers & Forehand, 1983; Schaughency & Lahey,
1985). Once established, these negative cognitive sets may in-
duce negative emotion in parents even when children's behavior
is not particularly negative (Brunk & Henggeler, 1984; Mash &
Johnston, 1982).
Appraisals of self-efficacy and control. Parents' experience
stronger negative emotion with children if they infer that they
are incompetent as parents or are unable to cope with or control
events. Furthermore, distressed mothers evaluate their parent-
ing less favorably than do nondistressed mothers and believe
that they are unable to control parent-child outcomes. Bugen-
tal and her associates (Bugental & Cortez, 1988; Bugental &
Shennum, 1984) have shown that, relative to adults who think
they have control over children, adults who think they lack con-
trol over children show heightened arousal and reactivity when
interacting with difficult children. Mothers' increasing faith
that they can control infant crying, furthermore, may be one
reason that experience with infants reduces arousal in response
to crying (Boukydis & Burgess, 1982). Beliefs about control over
children distinguish distressed from nondistressed mothers.
Compared with nonabusive mothers, for example, abusive
mothers think they are less competent as parents (Rosenberg &
Repucci, 1983) and that they have less control over the out-
11
comes of parent-child interaction (Bugental, Blue, & Cruzcosa,
1989). Given the difficulty that coercive and highly stressed
parents have eliciting compliance from their children (Hether-
ington et al, 1978; Patterson, 1982), these parents too may de-
velop beliefs that they are incompetent as parents and lack con-
trol over children. Thus, parents in distressed families not only
activate concerns children are unlikely to promote, but they
develop beliefs about their children and their inefficacy as par-
ents that fuel negative emotions and lead them to communicate
irritation and dysphoria, further undermining their control
(Bugental, Mantyla, & Lewis, 1989; Bugental & Shennum,
1984).
Children's Emotion-Arousing Behavior
and Other External Events:
Objective Determinants of Emotion
In addition to parents' concerns and their appraisal, the sec-
ond set of determinants of emotion are the objective child be-
haviors and life events with which parents are confronted (see
Figure 1). Because of their lack of parenting skill and the char-
acteristics of their children and contexts, some parents face
high numbers of life events and child behaviors that undermine
their concerns, whereas other parents do not.
Parenting skills. Although aspects of parenting skill are sub-
jective, parenting skill also influences the objective events par-
ents face, particularly the extent to which they face emotion-
arousing behavior from their children. The likelihood that chil-
dren will display emotion-arousing behavior depends both on
how parents raise them in general and on how parents respond
to them during particular interactions. Certain forms of parent-
ing facilitate development of those competencies and disposi-
tions in children that are likely to promote cooperative, harmo-
nious interaction. Parents of socially competent children tend
to be responsive, to express warmth and affection, to reason
and communicate openly, to make appropriate demands for
mature behavior, to establish and enforce consistent rules, and
to avoid arbitrary, restrictive, or punitive control (for reviews,
see GrusecA Lytton, 1988; Maccoby, 1980; Maccoby & Martin,
1983). Such parenting increases positive emotion and reduces
negative emotion because it teaches children cooperative, re-
sponsive behavior, social problem-solving skills, knowledge of
social relationships, and the expectation that parents will recip-
rocate fairness and sensitivity.
In contrast, distressed parents experience high levels of anger
and dysphoria because they fail to elicit child behaviors that
promote their immediate concerns and fail to instill in children
the stable competencies and dispositions necessary for coopera-
tive interaction. Mothers who are abusive, coercive, or under
stress fail to monitor and attend to children's behavior closely
(Wahler & Dumas, 1989) and, therefore, are less able than other
mothers to coordinate their concerns and actions with the con-
cerns and actions of their children. These mothers fail to com-
municate clear expectations to which children can conform
(Azar et al, 1984; Rickard et al, 1981; \asta, 1982) and are
unable to formulate solutions to situations that involve incom-
patible parent and child behavior (Azar et al, 1984). Further-
more, abusive and coercive mothers inadvertently train their
children to be noncompliant (Parke & Slaby, 1983; Patterson,
 12 THEODORE DIX
1982). They often reinforce noncompliant behavior, punish co-
operative behavior, and in general use rewards and punish-
ments inconsistently When their children are noncompliant,
these mothers have limited repertoires of techniques for elicit-
ing compliance (Trickett & Ruczynski, 1986). Abusive and
coercive mothers also fail to emit the positive, cooperative re-
sponses that support children's plans and concerns (Burgess &
Conger, 1978; Patterson, 1982); as a result, they have difficulty
eliciting cooperative motives from their children and receptiv-
ity to subsequent parental influence (Maccoby & Martin,
1983). Thus, children of coercive and abusive mothers often do
not know what behavior their mothers expect, do not think
their mothers are acting cooperatively to promote their con-
cerns, do not expect their plan or value violations to be noticed
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and sanctioned consistently, and think their interests are maxi-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
mized by self-promoting, coercive strategies rather than by rela-
tionship-promoting, cooperative strategies.
Depressed mothers also manifest child-rearing deficiencies
that should interfere with the reciprocal, cooperative exchanges
associated with desirable emotions. First, depressed mothers
appear less likely than nondepressed mothers to adopt em-
pathic interaction strategies. They are less responsive to chil-
dren's concerns and less likely to initiate actions that consider
children's concerns (Cox et al, 1987; Kochanska & Kuczynski,
1989). Their responses are less consistent, sensitive, and contin-
gent on children's prior behavior than are the responses of other
mothers (Field et al, 1985; Fleming, Ruble, Flett, & Shaul,
1988). Depressed mothers speak more slowly, less contingently,
less positively, and less predictably than do nondepressed
mothers (Bettes, 1988). They appear less attuned to the child's
position in the interaction (Field et al., 1990). Second, de-
pressed mothers are less likely to use cooperative strategies ef-
fectively. They explain, negotiate, and compromise with their
children less than do nondepressed mothers (Cox et al, 1987;
Kochanska et al, 1987). Third, depressed mothers appear to
adopt forceful strategies that are ineffective; their discipline is
more hostile and controlling than the discipline of nonde-
pressed mothers (Cox et al, 1987; Kochanska & Kuczynski,
1989; Panaccione & Wahler, 1986). Fourth, because they are
less involved and more avoidant, depressed mothers are less
effective at socializing cooperative dispositions and the internal-
ization of altruistic rules and values (Downey & Coyne, 1990;
Richters & Pelligrini, 1989; Zahn-Waxler, Cummings, Mc-
Knew, & Radke-Yarrow, 1984). This research implies that the
children of depressed mothers must coordinate their behavior
with an interaction partner who is unresponsive and unpredict-
able, who is less likely than other mothers to promote the child's
concerns, who is less able to elicit cooperation with parental
plans, and who is more likely to use forceful strategies that fail
to reconcile conflicting parent and child concerns. Thus, con-
siderable evidence from multiple distressed groups demon-
strates that lack of parenting skill is an important determinant
of negative emotion in these families.
Child factors. Some children have characteristics that make
them more likely than others to elicit positive or negative emo-
tion from parents (see Bell & Chapman, 1986). The model pro-
posed here suggests that the characteristics of children that
arouse parental affect should be those that influence whether
children promote or undermine parental concerns. This ap-
pears to be true. Compared with children who are compliant
and self-controlled, children who are highly active, noncom-
pliant, or impulsive elicit higher levels of conflict and negative
affect from parents (Buss, 1981; Lee & Bates, 1985; Mash &
Johnston, 1982; Patterson, 1982; Stevens-Long, 1973) and more
negative child rearing from both their mothers and other care-
givers (Anderson, Lytton, & Romney, 1986; Lee & Bates, 1985;
Patterson, 1982; Power & Chapieski, 1986). Highly active chil-
dren, for example, become involved in more power struggles
with parents and elicit hostility and frustration from parents
during teaching tasks (Buss, 1981). Children who are socially
unresponsive also elicit greater negative affect and control from
adults than do responsive children (Bugental & Shennum, 1984;
Cantor, Wood, & Gelfand, 1977; Keller & Bell, 1979). Infants
with difficult temperaments elicit greater arousal and distress
from caregivers than do infants who are not difficult (Boukydis
& Burgess, 1982), and their mothers report lower levels of well-
being and life satisfaction (Levitt, Weber, & Clark, 1986). Fi-
nally, children with poor cognitive and social competencies en-
gage in more plan-violating behavior and, as a result, elicit
greater negative affect (Fawl, 1963; Goodenough, 1931; Mac-
coby, 1984; Patterson, 1976,1982; Smetana, 1984).
Children from virtually every distressed family type are
more difficult interaction partners than are average children.
The children of abusive, coercive, or divorcing mothers are
more aggressive, comply less with adult commands, and elicit
more negative controls from adults than do children from non-
distressed families (Anderson et al, 1986; Bousha & Twenty-
man, 1984; Forehand, King, Peed, & Yoder, 1975; Hethering-
ton et al, 1978; Patterson, 1982; Reid, Taplin, & Lorber, 1981;
Trickett & Kuczynski, 1986; Wolfe, 1985). Similarly, children of
depressed mothers are more aggressive, are more emotional,
and are more likely to exhibit behavioral problems than are
comparison children (Cox et al, 1987; Downey & Coyne, 1990;
Zahn-Waxler et al, 1984). As infants, children of depressed
mothers are more negative, less positive, less active, and less
responsive than are the infants of nondepressed mothers (Field,
1984; Field et al, 1988). Premature infants are also difficult
interaction partners. Compared with full-term infants, they are
harder to feed, have more aversive cry patterns, and are less
alert and responsive to adults (Brown & Bakeman, 1980; Frodi
et al, 1978; Goldberg, 1979). It is clear that children from dis-
tressed families have qualities that present formidable prob-
lems for their parents and other caregivers. In some cases these
are evident even in the first months of life (Field et al, 1988).
^s Contextual factors. Families function within contexts that
differ greatly in their potential to arouse positive and negative
emotion. The most important contextual factors are probably
those associated with socioeconomic status. By controlling ac-
cess to employment, housing, medical care, child care, and
other vital resources, social class variables are critical to
whether parents are able to promote their concerns. Relative to
parents from higher classes, lower-class parents have fewer re-
sources and face greater obstacles; it is not surprising that they
report greater negative emotion and psychological distress (see
McLoyd, 1990, for a review). Closely related to socioeconomic
factors are contextual factors associated with stress and social
support. High-stress, low-support environments impose diffi-
cult tasks on parents and sap them of resources they need. Liter-
 THE AFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF PARENTING
ature reviewed in this article has shown that stressful environ-
ments are associated with negative emotion, supportive environ-
ments with positive emotion. Stress and support variables di-
rectly control the resources and impediments that determine
parents' success at promoting their concerns and indirectly
control the behaviors of spouses and children to which parents
must respond.
In addition to life experiences and social conditions, parents'
emotions are influenced by specific activities and settings (Val-
siner, 1984). A young child eating messy foods in the living
room is a disaster waiting to happen; the same child at a park
may play for hours without problematic behavior. What may be
crucial about settings is the extent to which the goals and con-
cerns they elicit from parents are compatible with the behaviors
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they elicit from children. An emphasis on compatibility implies
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
that, on average, parents should experience more negative emo-
tion when situations (a) are rigid rather than flexible in the
behaviors they require of children, (b) require behaviors that do
not correspond to children's motivation or competencies, and
(c) stimulate in children behaviors that conflict with the plans
and concerns they elicit from parents. Rx>d-related activity and
formal living rooms promote negative emotion because they
activate parental concerns that require children to act in ways
that are difficult for them and of little interest to them. Play-
grounds promote positive emotion because the concerns they
elicit from parents constrain children minimally and promote
behaviors children are both capable of and motivated to per-
form. Thus, parents' emotions depend on whether they can
guide children into activities that facilitate a match between
children's behavior and parents' plans and concerns (Holden,
1983; Parke & Slaby, 1983).
Summary of Activation Processes
Emotion activation reflects the interplay of the concerns par-
ents bring to interactions with children (subjective factors) and
the children and contexts that determine whether those con-
cerns are realized (objective factors). In terms of subjective fac-
tors, distressed parents experience high levels of negative emo-
tion because they select plans and have expectations children
are likely to violate, perceive violations as caused by negative
intentions and dispositions in their children, and infer that they
have little control over promoting their concerns with children.
For the most part, the selection and appraisal of concerns is
probably automatic and unconscious, made mindless by count-
less parent-child interactions. In terms of objective factors, dis-
tressed parents face more difficult children, within more stress-
ful contexts, and with fewer parenting skills than do nondis-
tressed parents. They fail to monitor children's behavior
adequately, they are unable to elicit child behaviors compatible
with their concerns, and they fail to socialize in children social
competencies and cooperative dispositions. Thus, the negative
emotions characteristic of distressed parents reflect a conver-
gence of factors that cause parent-child interactions to lack
mutuality and coordination and, thus, to consistently under-
mine parental concerns.
Emotional Engagement: The Effects of Emotion
on Parenting Processes and Behaviors
In addition to emotion activation, a second fundamental is-
sue in emotion and parenting is how emotion influences parent-
13
ing once it is aroused. Worried, angry, and happy parents
clearly differ. Because they have appraised events differently,
they have activated emotions that place them in different states
of cognitive and behavioral readiness. Emotion has mobilized
their resources for efficient and focused responding to situa-
tions of the kind each perceives to be present. I discuss the
consequences of emotion for parenting in terms of four overlap-
ping sets of processes: motivation, cognition, expressive behav-
iors, and action tendencies (see Figure 1).
Effects on Parent Motivation
Once aroused, emotions influence motivation. They activate
motives that bring direction and intensity to behavior. Parents'
emotions motivate efforts to comfort, protect, stimulate, and
discipline children. It is their joy at an infant's smile that urges
parents to be affectionate and their irritation at a child's de-
fiance that pushes them to enforce rules firmly.
Without emotional engagement, parenting efforts may be ac-
tivated with insufficient frequency, persistence, or intensity. Par-
ents who are depressed, distracted, or psychologically unavail-
able do not experience those child-related emotions that nor-
mally motivate socialization efforts. Although rarely studied,
absence of emotional investment in, and reactivity to, children
appears to be important to several parenting problems. Parents
in distressed marriages, for example, show a pattern of physio-
logical underarousal when interacting with children on teach-
ing tasks (Gottman & Katz, 1989). Their parenting is cold,
unresponsive, and low in limit setting, although also character-
ized by anger. Similarly, neglectful parents are uninvorved,
emotionally unavailable, and indifferent to most parenting
tasks (Bousha & Twentyman, 1984; Crittenden, 1981; Maccoby
& Martin, 1983; Polansky, Chalmers, Williams, & Butten-
wieser, 1981). Polansky et al. (1981) found that neglectful
mothers suffered from "massive affect inhibition" (p. 201). Rela-
tive to normal mothers, they were detached, inaccessible, and
lacked the "energy normally available for investment in child
caring" (p. 147). Similarly, mothers who develop avoidant at-
tachments with their infants are characterized by lack of emo-
tional responsiveness and psychological unavailability (Ege-
land & Farber, 1984). Flat, unresponsive affect is also present in
many depressed mothers. Field et al. (1990) found that nearly
30% of the depressed mothers in their sample were disengaged
and emotionally unavailable. These complex parenting pat-
terns certainly involve more than an absence of appropriate
emotional reactivity; in fact, some researchers have proposed
that the indifference and unavailability of even neglectful
mothers mask depression and hostility (Polansky et al., 1981).
These affective deficits probably do not reflect lack of emotion
per se, but lack of empathic or socialization-relevant emotions;
these parents may not feel emotions normal parents feel when
their children's well-being is affected (Dix, in press; Feshbach,
1987). Overwhelmed by immediate life tasks, distressed
mothers may suppress or never activate the child-oriented emo-
tions that normally motivate effective parenting. Abusive
mothers, in fact, report less empathic affect with children than
do nonabusive parents (Feshbach, 1987). Thus, failures to feel
worrx joy, or pride when outcomes significant for children oc-
 14 THEODORE DIX
cur may be part of a complex process that disengages the emo-
tions that motivate effective parenting.
At the other extreme, some parents may experience emotions
that are too strong and that induce motives that undermine
parenting. One reason strong emotion may disrupt parenting is
its tendency to increase short-term, self-focused motives and to
decrease long-term, child-focused motives (Maccoby & Martin,
1983). Emotion brings urgency to interaction and leads to "the
preponderance of short term over long term gain" (Frijda, 1986,
p. 476). At high levels it increases selection of small, immediate
rewards over larger delayed rewards (see Moore, Underwood, &
Rosenhan, 1984, for a review). Strong anger at a child's scream-
ing may induce a motive to stop that noise, a short-term self-fo-
cused motive, and suppress a motive to teach the child more
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appropriate behavior, a long-term child-focused motive. Short-
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term, self-focused motives are probably adaptive for parents.
They distance parents from tantrums and other aversive events
and maintain conversations with friends and other pleasurable
events. But because effective parenting requires concern for
children, strong self-focused motives are frequently not adap-
tive for child rearing. They can undermine parenting when they
are consistently stronger than motives to correct, teach, sup-
port, or respond to the needs of children.
An emphasis on immediate compliance with parental expec-
tations, often at the expense of attention to children's wants and
needs, appears to characterize parenting in some distressed
families. Parents under stress appear to lack patience and toler-
ance for frustration (Belsky, 1984; Belsky, Robins, & Gamble,
1984; cf. Berkowitz, 1972). Mothers of aggressive boys "react in
such a way as to stop pain immediately'' (Patterson, 1982, p.
279) and in ways that "serve some short term purpose" (Patter-
son, 1982, p. 280). As noted above, high self-focus and low child
focus characterize the parenting of depressed mothers, mothers
who develop avoidant attachments to their infants, and teenage
mothers who express high levels of negative affect to their in-
fants. Furthermore, it is perhaps because distressed parents ur-
gently want control and, thereby, an immediate reduction in
negative emotion, that they prefer powerful, controlling disci-
pline more than do nondistressed parents (Colletta, 1979; Heth-
erington et al, 1978; Trickett & Kuczynski, 1986). Parenting
that consistently emphasizes immediate reduction of negative
emotion will leave important long-term needs of children un-
addressed and make cooperative, compatible interaction diffi-
cult to achieve.
In addition to inducing short-term, self-oriented motives,
strong negative emotion may increase sensitivity to aversive
child stimuli and reduce sensitivity to positive child stimuli.
Compared with parents who are not upset, parents who are
angry or depressed may experience children's joy and happi-
ness as less uplifting (Donovan, Leavitt, & Balling, 1978) and
childrenls incompatible behavior as more aversive. Hypersensi-
tivity to aversive stimuli has been proposed to account for the
hostile, punitive parenting common among abusive parents,
depressed parents, and parents under stress (Bauer & Twenty-
man, 1985; Forehand et al., 1987; Knutson, 1978; Lahey et al,
1984). Forehand et al. (1987) proposed that "individual differ-
ences between parents concerning their tolerance of specific
child behaviors can be influenced by even mild levels of depres-
sion, which can be produced by such stressors as marital con-
flict, job stress, or financial difficulties" (p. 9). This hypothesis
is supported by data showing that, compared with nonabusive
mothers, abusive mothers are more affectively reactive to aver-
sive child stimuli (Prodi & Lamb, 1980; Wolfe, Fairbank, Kelly,
& Bradlyn, 1983) and report greater annoyance during interac-
tions with children (Forehand et al, 1987; Trickett & Kuc-
zynski, 1986). Consistent, as well, are findings showing that
depressed mothers are unable to tolerate children's noise
(Weissman & Paykel, 1974) and show greater distress during
conflictual interactions with children (Cox et al, 1987). Com-
pared with nondepressed mothers, depressed mothers also are
more motivated to give in to children, to resist effortful requests
from their children, and to avoid difficult, confrontational
child rearing interactions (Kochanska et al, 1987). Because it
induces motives to avoid and placate children, hypersenshivity
may result in failures to engage in numerous difficult parent-
child interactions important to socialization.
In summary, available evidence suggests that, by inducing
self-oriented motives and hypersensitivity to aversive events,
strong negative emotion disrupts motivational aspects of parent-
ing. Available evidence is limited, however, to highly negative
emotions among distressed mothers and typically is drawn
from studies that do not explicitly test motivational hypotheses.
Nearly absent is research on average parents and on the motiva-
tional properties of empathic emotions, positive emotions, and
negative emotions of mild or moderate intensity. Proposals that
positive emotions are optimal for family communication and
problem solving (Blechman, 1990) imply that, in contrast to
negative emotions, positive emotions may not increase self-fo-
cus and may reduce, rather than increase, sensitivity to aversive
behavior.
Effects on Parent Perception and Cognition
In addition to changes in motivation, emotion induces
changes in perception and cognition. Emotion controls sensitiv-
ity and attention to stimuli (Derryberry & Rothbart, 1984;
Frijda, 1986; Izard, 1984; Zajonc & Markus, 1984); encoding,
storage, and retrieval of information (Blaney, 1986; Bower,
1981; M. S. Clark & Isen, 1982; Izard, 1984); allocation of pro-
cessing time and capacity (Derryberry & Rothbart, 1984; Eas-
terbrook, 1959; Frijda, 1986); the meaning attributed to infor-
mation (Izard, 1984; Moore et al, 1984); and the decision rules
or strategies people use (Isen, Means, Patrick, & Nowicki,
1982). Researchers have emphasized that, by orienting atten-
tion, encoding, memory, and decision processes, emotion can
facilitate or disrupt appraisals of events.
Four hypotheses about emotion's impact on cognition have
been proposed in the child rearing literature; all account for
why strong negative emotion disrupts parent cognition. The
most common hypothesis is that negative emotion creates a
propensity in parents to view children negatively. Negative
emotions are thought to increase negative expectations, percep-
tions, and evaluations of children's behavior and to promote
attributions that children intend and have control over their
negative behavior (Brody & Forehand, 1988; Conger et al, 1984;
Goodnow, 1988; Greist et al, 1979; Panaccione & Wahler, 1986;
Patterson, 1982; Rickard et al, 1981; Vasta, 1982). Consistent
with this hypothesis, parents' levels of psychological distress
 THE AFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF PARENTING
correlate with the negativity of their evaluations of children's
behavior (Conger et al, 1984; Panaccione & Wahler, 1986;
Rogers & Forehand, 1983; Samerofr, Seifer, & Elias, 1982). Also
consistent with this hypothesis, the literature on appraisal pro-
cesses, reviewed earlier in this article, has shown that distressed
mothers are more negative in their perceptions and attributions
about children than are nondistressed mothers. Yet, these re-
sults need not reflect an affective biasing of parent cognition.
They could occur because negative emotions result from, rather
than cause, negative cognitions or because children in dis-
tressed families have higher rates of problematic behavior. Less
equivocal are findings from research that had the same parents,
when in different moods, evaluate identical child behavior
(Dix, Reinhold, & Zambarano, 1990). Consistent with a cogni-
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tive distortion hypothesis, this research has shown that, when
momentarily angry, mothers have more negative expectations
of children, make more negative attributions for children's be-
havior, and recommend more negative parental responses than
when unemotional. Also, mothers who are momentarily angry
think the current developmental problems of their own chil-
dren are more serious, and they expect their children to act
more negatively in problem situations. Thus, there is emerging
evidence that negative emotions make appraisals of children
more negative.
A second hypothesis is that negative emotion disrupts paren-
tal monitoring and attention. Wahler and Dumas (1989) have
proposed that stress narrows parents' attention, reduces their
use of information, and activates relatively rigid social con-
structs for assimilating children's behavior (see also Cox et al.,
1987). Closely related is the proposal that stress and negative
emotion distract parents from the tasks of child rearing and
preoccupy parents such that the time and attention available for
parenting decrease (Hetherington & Camara, 1984; Patterson,
1982; Zussman, 1980). Support for this hypothesis comes from
several sources. First, relative to nondepressed mothers, de-
pressed mothers tend to be preoccupied and inattentive, to ig-
nore children's bids for attention, and to require children to
make higher intensity demands (Cox et al, 1987; Field et al.,
1985; Weissman & Paykel, 1974). Second, mothers from various
distressed groups show a pattern of indiscriminant parenting.
As though unaware of the child's behavior, depressed mothers,
mothers under stress, and mothers of aggressive boys all re-
spond in ways that depend less on immediate cues from the
child than do nondistressed mothers (Brody & Forehand, 1986;
Dumas & Wahler, 1986; Greist et al., 1979; Patterson, 1982).
Third, tasks that induce high attentional demands induce a
highly controlling style of parenting similar to that characteris-
tic of distressed parents (Zussman, 1980). Fourth, compared
with nondistressed mothers, distressed mothers show deficits
in their ability to give accurate and detailed accounts of chil-
dren's behavior (see Wahler & Dumas, 1989). Thus, strong nega-
tive emotion may disrupt parents' monitoring of children's be-
havior.
A third hypothesis is that negative emotion disrupts parental
problem solving and the ability to reason clearly about child
rearing conflicts (Emmerich, 1969; Maccoby, 1980; Patterson,
1982). Vasta (1982) has argued that strong negative emotion
impairs parents' "rational response guidance, leaving subse-
quent responding under more emotional reflexive control" (pp.
15
137-138). Consistent with this hypothesis, mothers experienc-
ing high stress perform more poorly on family problem-solving
tasks than do mothers experiencing low stress (Patterson,
1982). Similarly, relative to mothers low in irritability, mothers
high in irritability define family problems more poorly, propose
poorer solutions, are less organized in their discussion of prob-
lems, and are more likely to leave conflicts unresolved (For-
gatch & Wieder, 1982, cited in Patterson, 1982). By undermin-
ing problem solving, strong negative emotion may make it diffi-
cult for parents to coordinate parent and child behavior when
incompatibility occurs. Does strong positive emotion have com-
parable effects? Perhaps not. Research outside the domain of
parenting has suggested that positive emotions may actually
facilitate problem solving (Blechman, 1990; Isen, 1987).
Fourth, the classic Yerkes-Dodson hypothesis (Duffy, 1962;
Yerkes & Dodson, 1908) suggests that an optimal level of
arousal exists for performance of any cognitive task and that the
more complex the task, the lower that optimal level. Consider-
able research has verified that strong emotion can disrupt per-
formance on complex tasks and that weak or moderate emotion
can facilitate performance on simple tasks (e.g, Revelle,
Humphreys, Simon, & Gilliland, 1980; Spence, 1958). Al-
though largely ignored by parenting researchers, this hypothe-
sis has important implications for child rearing. It implies that,
when decision making is straightforward, arousal of low to
moderate emotion may facilitate monitoring and processing of
child-relevant information. Parents who foil to activate emotion
at these times may be insufficiently attentive and slow and unfo-
cused in the ways they process information and make deci-
sions. When strong, on the other hand, emotion may disrupt
complex information processing and lead to simplified deci-
sion making when tasks require, instead, thorough and consid-
ered processing. The poor problem solving of irritable mothers
may be an example of arousal undermining complex informa-
tion processing (Forgatch & Wieder, 1981, cited in Patterson,
1982).
Thus, there is emerging evidence, primarily from research
with distressed mothers, that strong negative emotions bias par-
enting judgments negatively, interfere with parents' attention
and monitoring of children's behavior, and disrupt parental
problem solving. Although conceptions of emotion imply that
emotion often facilitates quick and focused appraisals of events,
there has been no research with parents on these potentially
beneficial effects. Also absent is research on the impact of posi-
tive emotions on parent cognition (although see Dix & Rein-
hold, 1991) and on the impact of negative emotions when low or
moderate in intensity. An additional hypothesis important to
the model proposed here—that empathic emotions sensitize
parents to information about children's reactions to events
(Dix, in press)—also remains untested.
Effects on Expressive Behavior: The Communication
of Emotion to Children
Parents' emotions induce expressive behavior: gestures, fa-
cial expressions, and tones of voice that communicate emotions
to children. These affective communications are important reg-
ulators of parent-child interaction (Bugental, Mantyla, &
Lewis, 1989; Malatesta, Culver, Tesman, & Shepard, 1989;
 16 THEODORE DIX
Sroufe, 1979). Modulated expressions of affect to infants elicit
infant attention and pace the reciprocal social patterns that
organize parent-infant interaction (Brazelton & Tronick, 1980;
Emde, 1980). Expressions that lack affect or that express nega-
tive affect produce distress and disorganization in infants
(Cohn & Tronick, 1983; Zekoski, O*Hara, & Wills, 1987). Emo-
tions are also reciprocated during parents' interactions with
older children. Expressions of positive affect tend to elicit posi-
tive, cooperative responses from children, whereas expressions
of negative affect tend to elicit negative, resistive reactions from
children (Cairns, 1979; Lahey et al., 1984; Lay, Waters, & Park,
1989; Maccoby, 1980; Panaccione & Wahler, 1986; cf. Bettes,
1988; Bugental, Mantyla, & Lewis, 1989). Even nuances of how
affect is expressed to children—for example, its timing, inten-
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sity, modulation over time, and relation to children's behavior—
are important to how children react (cf. Sroufe, Schork, Motti,
Lawroski, & LaFreniere, 1984; Bugental & Shennum, 1984).
The affective expressions of parents influence parent-child
interaction in several ways. First, as implied by affective reci-
procity, they influence children's emotions. Displays of positive
affect elicit from children enthusiasm and positive emotion that
increase the probability that children will comply with adult
requests (Lay et al, 1989; see Sroufe et al., 1984). In contrast,
displays of negative emotion often elicit from children irrita-
tion, disappointment, and other negative emotions. These nega-
tive emotions probably contribute to the escalating cycles of
coercion that characterize interactions with abusive, coercive,
and depressed mothers (Bugental, Mantyla, & Lewis, 1989;
Field et al, 1990; Patterson, 1982). Bugental and her colleagues
(Bugental, Mantyla, & Lewis, 1989; Bugental & Shennum,
1984) have shown that abusive mothers and others who think
they lack control over children often display tentative and am-
biguous affective expressions that promote problematic reac-
tions from children.
Second, affective expressions are salient; they elicit children's
attention and increase children's ability to process parental
messages. Tentative messages can fail to capture children's at-
tention; affectively ambiguous messages can confuse them; and
highly negative messages can make them too angry or afraid to
process information effectively (Hoffman, 1983). Parents must
control the affective quality of their communication to ensure
that communications are received and comprehended.
Third, parents' expressions of affect give children informa-
tion: They help children know what parental concerns are in
force, what parents expect, and how parents are likely to act
(Weiner, Graham, Stern, & Lawsen, 1982). If parent-child in-
teraction is to be well coordinated, children need this informa-
tion. Parental anger, for example, informs children that their
behavior is unacceptable, that parents expect a change in
thought or action, and that serious consequences may follow.
Weak or ambiguous affective messages fail to communicate par-
ents' wants and intentions adequately and thereby undermine
children's ability to promote parental concerns. The informa-
tional value of parents' affective expressions is demonstrated by
research that has shown that even during infancy children ap-
proach or avoid unfamiliar situations on the basis of the affec-
tive cues sent by their mothers (Sorce, Emde, Campos, & KJin-
nert, 1985). One factor predisposing abusive parents to conflict
with their children may be their tendency to send ambiguous
affective messages (Bugental, Love, Kaswan, & April, 1971; Bu-
gental, Mantyla, & Lewis, 1989; Camras et al, 1988).
In summary, parental affect may be central to activating orga-
nized and potent forms of communication that determine
whether children are likely to promote or disrupt parents' plans
and concerns. Specifically, affective communications elicit re-
ciprocal affect in children, promote children's processing of
parental messages, and provide information about parents' in-
tentions and evaluations that are important to eliciting coopera-
tive child behavior.
Effects on Behavioral Tendencies
Although emotions do not induce specific instrumental ac-
tions in humans, they are linked with what are variously called
action impulses (Lazarus, 1975), behavioral instructions (Kel-
ley, 1984), response tendencies (Plutchik, 1980; Tomkins,
1982), or action tendencies (Frijda, 1986). Angry parents are
primed to speak loudly, firmly, perhaps harshly; to refute and
condemn; to punish or strike. Happy parents are primed to
smile, humor, listen, or encourage. Parents may have reper-
toires of emotion-linked parenting tendencies that become
more likely to occur when the emotion with which they are
linked is activated. Emotions may also inhibit action tendencies
with which they are inconsistent. Parents who are angry may
have difficulty providing support and encouragement, whereas
parents who are joyous may have difficulty disciplining chil-
dren firmly (cf. P. A. Miller & Eisenberg, 1988; Slaby, 1974).
Such emotion-action linkage may be stronger for negative than
for positive emotions. Often joy and excitement are not linked
with particular instrumental actions; they promote general ten-
dencies to engage others rather than particular forms of engage-
ment (Frijda, 1986). Links between specific emotions and readi-
ness for specific forms of action are emerging in research out-
side of parenting (Frijda, Kuipers, & ter Shure, 1989).
Many child rearing researchers have assumed that emotions
directly activate emotion-consistent parenting. In particular,
anger is widely thought to increase commanding, punitive par-
enting (Patterson, 1982; Stolz, 1967; Vasta, 1982). Although af-
fective priming has not been established as the cause, com-
manding, punitive discipline is prominent among parents from
most distressed parent groups (Brody & Forehand, 1988; Heth-
erington et al., 1978; Patterson, 1982; Vasta, 1982). Further-
more, angry parents report a stronger preference for negative,
power-assertive parenting than do unemotional parents (Dix et
al., 1990; see also Stevens-Long, 1973). Links between parents'
emotions and child rearing behaviors may be important for
understanding emotions' role in dysfunctional parenting. If af-
fective priming of action tendencies facilitates quick, organized
responses, as emotion researchers have suggested, then parents
who fail to experience appropriate child-related affect may
show slow, inefficient, or poorly coordinated responses to chil-
dren. If emotional priming is too strong, on the other hand,
primed responses may overwhelm parents' ability to control
them (Vasta, 1982). They may preempt responses parents use
when unemotional and that in calmer moments parents view as
desirable. Emotion-linked parenting responses may also be
problematic for children when primed responses are incompati-
ble with responses current socialization tasks require (see
 THE AFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF PARENTING
Frijda, 1986, p. 79). Angry or depressed parents may be primed
to avoid, criticize, or punish children at moments when chil-
dren instead need support, instruction, or clarification. The
priming of action tendencies may be one way that emotions
activated hy work, marital conflict, or other stressful events
undermine effective parenting.
Summary of Engagement Processes
Once aroused, emotions activate and organize cognition, in-
duce motives to maintain or change immediate circumstances,
communicate to children parents' intentions and reactions, and
prime action tendencies likely to be needed. Parenting may
require paced activation of particular kinds and intensities of
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emotion if parenting is to be quick, focused, and responsive. If
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emotion is insufficient, adaptive systems may be poorly en-
gaged: Parents may fail to monitor and process child-related
information effectively, may be unmotivated for parenting
tasks, may be unprepared to display needed behaviors, and may
fail to communicate intentions and reactions in ways that en-
gage and motivate children. On the other hand, if emotion is
negative and excessive, it may disrupt cognition and decision
making, activate motives that conflict with responding to chil-
dren's needs, induce action tendencies that overwhelm pro-
cesses that normally control negative emotion, and lead to nega-
tive expressive behaviors that elicit fear, anger, or disorganiza-
tion from children. Furthermore, if emotion is not matched to
immediate circumstances with the child, it may induce ap-
praisals, motives, and reactions that interfere with the require-
ments of immediate parenting tasks. Parenting in many dis-
tressed families appears to be characterized by these deficits.
Emotion Regulation: Monitoring, Interpreting, and
Controlling Emotion
In addition to activation and engagement, the third and least
understood aspect of parents' emotions is how parents regulate
them (see Figure 1). This regulation is certain to be complex and
to include at least three elements. The first is parents' awareness
and understanding of their emotions. Part of regulating emo-
tion is becoming aware that emotion is occurring, assessing
what emotion it is, and deciding why it is occurring (Konecni,
1975; Schachter & Singer, 1963). Important differences in par-
enting across parents, situations, and social groups may reflect
differences in parents' sensitivity to when they are experiencing
emotion, in their identification of which emotion is present,
and in their attributions about why that emotion is occurring.
Second, emotion regulation involves appraisals of the effects
emotions will have if expressed. Parents often must decide, for
example, whether expressing their anger will upset their chil-
dren, motivate their children, or simply further upset parents
(cf. Emmerich, 1969; Masters & Carlson, 1984; Stolz, 1967).
Most parents inhibit negative emotion routinely. Mothers be-
lieve that negative emotions adversely affect parenting (Dix et
al, 1990), and many worry that their anger will cause them to
harm their children (Frude & Goss, 1979). Child abuse may in
fact reflect disruption of the cognitive processes that normally
enable parents to anticipate the destructive consequences
strong anger can have for children (Vasta, 1982). Positive emo-
17
tions are also regulated by beliefs about their consequences.
Some parents may inhibit expressions of positive emotion for
fear that they will spoil their children, whereas others may aug-
ment positive emotions believing this will benefit children. Par-
ents may differ in the extent to which they anticipate the conse-
quences their emotions have for children and in what they think
those consequences are. Virtually nothing is known about how
parents think emotional expressions affect children of various
ages and in various contexts.
Finally, emotion regulation during parenting involves con-
trol. Parents must develop cognitive, affective, and behavioral
routines that control when and how emotion is both experi-
enced and expressed. Because negative emotions often have
more serious consequences for children than positive emotions,
strategies that control negative emotions are particularly im-
portant to parenting. Although parents report regular use of
techniques to control negative emotion (Frude & Goss, 1979;
Holloway & Machida, in press), little is known about these tech-
niques and when they are used. Some research has suggested
that controlling negative emotions involves cognition. Parents
may reappraise events that elicit strong negative emotion in an
attempt to objectify, distort, or depersonalize those events (Laz-
arus, 1975). They may reevaluate children's motives, actions, or
limitations in attempts to perceive children less negatively
(Goodnow, 1988). They may initiate internal dialogues (e.g,
"you dont really want to hit her," "just relax and speak slowly")
that diffuse negative emotions and amplify motives that com-
pete with yelling at or striking children (e.g, Meichenbaum,
1977; Slaby, 1974). Mothers who cope with stress by using prob-
lem-solving or positive-reappraisal strategies become less dis-
tressed than those who use avoidance or denial strategies (Hol-
loway & Machida, in press). In addition to cognition, parents
control negative emotions with behavior. They initiate actions
that compete with yelling, hitting, and other undesirable emo-
tional behaviors. They walk away from children, force them-
selves to speak quietly, or relinquish caretaking to their spouses.
Parents who have repertoires of such actions diffuse violent
emotion sufficiently to avoid its most destructive consequences.
Parents initiate behaviors, not only to suppress negative emo-
tions, but to augment positive emotions. To elicit children's at-
tention and motivation, for example, they speak with infants
and young children in ways that exaggerate positive affects (see
Snow & Ferguson, 1977). Finally, parents control negative emo-
tions with other emotions. They control anger, for example, by
becoming afraid of their anger and its possible effects. Second-
ary fear or empathy for children then inhibits destructive ex-
pressions of anger (Feshbach, 1989; Letourneau, 1981). Al-
though none of these processes has been adequately studied,
there is nonetheless consensus among both researchers and cli-
nicians that lack of control over negative emotion is an impor-
tant determinant of abusive and coercive parenting (Feshbach,
1989; Lahey et al, 1984; Patterson, 1982; Vasta, 1982). In fact,
many psychologists advocate including emotion and stress-re-
duction training as part of parent treatment programs (Lutzker,
1984; Patterson, 1982).
In summary, an affective model highlights processes that am-
plify, suppress, and in general regulate emotions and their ex-
pression. Regulation processes control moment-to-moment
changes in emotions and their expression so that interactions
 18 THEODORE DIX
with children actualize parents' plans and concerns. Failures to
regulate emotion adequately may lead parents to experience
insufficient or excessive emotion or to express emotion in ways
that are detrimental to children and to the coordination of par-
ent and child behavior.
Research Agenda
Conceptual and Methodological Problems
The affective model developed here has heuristic value: It
suggests why so little is known about affective aspects of parent-
ing and specifies questions that need to be addressed if knowl-
edge is to increase. Progress has been limited by static and
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
simplistic views of emotion. Parents' emotions have been
thought to have only one dimension, positive-negative, and par-
ents' position along that dimension has been seen as fixed, inde-
pendent of the children with whom parents are interacting and
of the parental concerns at issue in the interaction. Yet, clearly
parents experience multiple and changing emotions that are
tied to specific concerns, events, and children. Parents differ
from one another, not only in their tendency to experience
positive or negative emotions, but in the specific types of posi-
tive and negative emotions they experience, in the circum-
stances that arouse those emotions, in how intense and lasting
they are, and in how parents cope with emotional arousal and
emotional interactions. Transactional views of parent-child in-
teraction offer a more complete account: They urge researchers
to recognize that emotions reflect person-environment rela-
tions that are continually changing, that depend on which spe-
cific emotion is aroused, and that reflect parents' ability to
promote specific concerns during interactions with their chil-
dren.
Knowledge has been limited as well by the methods com-
monly used to study parents' emotions. Parents' emotions are
poorly understood in part because they are complex and diffi-
cult to observe and quantify. Parenting researchers have typi-
cally measured emotion in two ways. First, they have solicited
parents' ratings along one or multiple scales. Although these
ratings can be valuable, they are usually not sufficiently differ-
entiated to represent complex affective processes very well. Of-
ten these ratings assess positive and negative attitudes about
children or parenting as much as they assess emotion. They are
limited by parents' awareness of their emotions, their interpre-
tations of their emotions, their understanding of emotion
words, and their attitudes about how they should or would like
to feel. Second, it is common to measure parents' emotions by
summarizing the degree of positive or negative emotion parents
express during brief interactions with their children. This
method is also insufficiently differentiated. Typically it ignores
which specific emotions are being expressed, why they are oc-
curring, what effects they have on the interaction, and how they
are resolved. Researchers using such measures assume a degree
of cross-situational stability in emotion that is almost certainly
absent.
A number of methods, some recently developed, look promis-
ing for improving the ability to specify which emotion is occur-
ring, when, and how strongly: (a) Detailed and reliable systems
are now available for coding specific affects from facial expres-
sions (Ekman & Friesen, 1978; Izard & Dougherty, 1982). (b)
Coding systems are available as well for coding specific affects
from vocal expression (Bugental & Shennum, 1984; Scherer,
1982). (c) Recent research has benefited from measures of heart
rate, galvanic skin response, and other physiological indicators
of arousal (e.g, Bugental & Cortez, 1988; Gottman & Katz,
1989; see Eisenberg & Miller, 1987). (d) Methods for eliciting
reliable daily reports of real-world emotions and the conditions
that give rise to them are being developed by social psycholo-
gists and could yield important information about parenting as
well (e.g, Emmons & King, 1988). (e) Reliable and valid reports
of emotion have been obtained by asking people to review vid-
eotapes of interactions they recently completed and to indicate
at each moment the emotion they were experiencing (Gottman
& Levenson, 1985). (f) Although standardized mood invento-
ries have been available for years (e.g. Multiple Affect Adjective
Checklist, Profile of Mood States), they have rarely been used
by parenting researchers. They are more reliable than most
single-scale self-report measures, typically assess multiple emo-
tions, and are more clearly distinct from attitudes and values
about children, (g) Finally, inducing moods so that their effects
can be observed has proven valuable in studies of how emotion
influences cognition and social behavior (e.g. Bower, 1981; Isen
et al, 1982). Inducing emotions is one way that the conse-
quences specific emotions have for parenting can be observed
(e.g, Jouriles, Murphy, & Dreary, 1989).
Directions for Future Research
Research has yet to address fundamental questions about the
role emotions play in parenting. Although emotions are occa-
sionally measured and frequently discussed in child rearing re-
search, few studies of parenting have tested hypotheses specifi-
cally about affective processes. The model proposed here sug-
gests that the following research directions might be
particularly fruitful for advancing knowledge in this area.
Descriptive Studies
There is a paucity of basic descriptive information on par-
ents' emotions. Little is known about the types, strengths, and
durations of parents' everyday emotions; the circumstances
that characteristically arouse them; and how they differ across
parents, types of children, and social and clinical groups. Re-
searchers have begun to characterize the everyday emotions of
adults generally, but not of parents (Averill, 1983; L. A. Clark &
Watson, 1988; Emmons & King, 1988; Larsen, Deiner, & Em-
mons, 1986).
Parents' Interaction Plans and Concerns
Little is known about the concerns that underlie parents'
emotional reactions. Although research has examined aspects
of parents' concerns—for example, the values parents wish to
instill in children and the forms of parenting they prefer (see
Goodnow & Collins, in press; Holden & Edwards, 1989)—emo-
tion-relevant concerns encompass more than beliefs and values
about child rearing. They include parents' self-oriented wants
and needs, their inherent tendencies toward and away from
 THE AFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF PARENTING
particular child-related stimuli, and their investments in com-
pleting countless activities and plans of action. None of these
has been studied adequately Knowledge is needed, not only of
what parents are concerned about, but of the processes they use
to select, modify evaluate, and replace their concerns from one
moment to the next. It seems particularly important to under-
stand how and why children's concerns become parents' con-
cerns and thereby influence parents' emotions and actions.
Processes Regulating Coordination of Parent
and Child Behavior
Parents' emotions reflect how successfully they influence
children and coordinate parent and child concerns. Although
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
considerable research has examined how parents control chil-
dren, relatively few studies have examined the strategies and
processes that comprise coordination rather than control
(Schaffer & Crook, 1979). Little is known about the strategies
parents use to monitor children's behavior, to influence the
direction of children's attention, or to facilitate children's com-
prehension of events and expectations. Little is known, as well,
about how parents elicit children's interest and enthusiasm, how
they interpret and use feedback from children, and how they
adapt plans to children's concerns, dispositions, and competen-
Positive and Empathic Emotion
An emphasis on anger, depression, and other undesirable
emotions among distressed parents has left positive and em-
pathic emotions largely unstudied. Although positive and em-
pathic emotions are commonly thought to be the fabric of effec-
tive parent-child relationships, their role in promoting commu-
nication, cooperation, trust, and social problem solving has not
been widely studied. Also unstudied is the role these emotions
play in regulating children's attention and motivation, inhibit-
ing parental anger and other potentially destructive emotions
and behaviors, and controlling parental information processing
and decision making. The need for research on positive emo-
tion is highlighted by studies showing that its effects on cogni-
tion and behavior are often distinctive: They are not simply the
mirror image of the effects of negative emotions (Frijda, 1986;
Isen, 1987).
Appraisal Processes
The significance parents attribute to children's behavior—
and thus its emotional impact—depends on personal and cul-
tural knowledge structures that are poorly understood. Little is
known about the implicit theories of children, child develop-
ment, and socialization that lead parents, for example, to per-
ceive some violations of their concerns as serious and portend-
ing significant difficulties and others as temporary excusable,
or developmentally appropriate. To understand parental emo-
tion, knowledge is needed of parents' interpretations of why
children act as they do; their beliefs about the obligations and
expectations that define family roles and relationships; and
their inferences about children's thoughts, feelings, intentions,
competencies, and dispositions. Research is needed, as well, on
19
the processes that lead particular interpretative structures to
get activated and used at particular moments.
Consequences of Emotion for Basic Parenting Skills,
Processes, and Behaviors
Little is known about how anger, sadness, happiness, and
other specific emotions influence performance of basic parent-
ing tasks. Research has barely begun to address issues as basic
as how specific emotions affect parents' monitoring, attention,
and judgment; their motivation to engage in or to avoid particu-
lar child rearing activities and interactions; their styles of play,
discipline, communication, and conflict resolution; and their
ability to be responsive and to coordinate parent and child be-
havior successfully
Regulation Processes
Finally, to understand emotions' role in socialization, re-
searchers need to address how parents understand and regulate
their emotions. Little is known about why parents think they
experience particular emotions with children, about when
those emotions are inappropriate or undesirable, about when
and why emotions should be expressed to children, and about
what cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes parents use
to control their emotions.
Conclusion
Humans have evolved complex affective systems that ensure
that concerns vital to individuals are promoted. These systems
are the heart of parenting. Parents bring to interactions with
children countless concerns that they very much want to pro-
mote. These concerns determine the outcomes parents seek
and the organization of their cognition and behavior. They con-
trol activation of emotions, which serve to orient and mobilize
processes parents need to promote their concerns. Emotions
are prominent in parent-child interaction because children are
vital to parents' daily concerns and life goals. Emotions are
barometers for relationships because they reflect parents' as-
sessments of how well interactions are proceeding and, over
time, how well relationships with children are proceeding. For-
tunately, the emotions of most parents are, on balance, positive.
Most parents think interactions with children are promoting
the concerns they have for themselves and their children. Al-
though common, their negative emotions are perturbations
that realign a system that on the whole is functioning well.
Their positive and empathic emotions motivate attunement to
children, facilitate responsiveness to the children's wants and
needs, and enable parents and children to coordinate their in-
teractions to the benefit of both. In contrast, distressed parents
perceive that they are doing poorly. For complex reasons their
concerns are continually undermined. They are unable to select
and manage interaction plans such that their concerns are pro-
moted, and, as a result, they experience aversive events and
negative emotions at high rates. In most families, this causes
parents to feel helpless, to perceive children negatively, and to
blame children for undermining parents' concerns and life
goals. Because the negative emotions of distressed parents are
 20 THEODORE DIX
chronic and intense, they can promote inattention, negative
perceptions of children, and poor problem solving. Negative
emotions can lead to parenting that is hypersensitive, avoidant,
punitive, overly controlling, and focused on self- rather than
child concerns, further undermining cooperative interactions.
Clearly, many of the ideas discussed here are speculative and
untested. Current knowledge gives researchers only limited un-
derstanding of how emotions function during socialization. For
most of its history, parenting research has ignored processes
regulating parenting in favor of understanding the effects par-
ents have on children. When accounts of parenting have been
forthcoming, they have emphasized cognitive and behavioral
factors, as have most theories of social behavior. Yet, concep-
tions of parenting that ignore emotions ignore the heart of the
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
matter. Emotions both bind and destroy parent-child relation-
ships. They determine how and how well parents respond to
children and over time how successfully development proceeds.
To understand child rearing, researchers must understand the
concerns about which parents care most and the emotions that
control their attempts to promote them.
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Received August 24,1989
Revision received November 21,1990
Accepted December 10,1990 •