The roles of paternal emotion dysregulation and maltreatment history on child emotion socialization.

OBJECTIVE: Fathers are often underrepresented in research, especially studies examining the impacts of maltreatment on parenting. Emotion socialization of children is one identified parenting behavior potentially influenced by childhood maltreatment and emotion dysregulation, but this link is less frequently examined in fathers. The present study examined whether paternal childhood maltreatment history was associated with paternal emotion socialization responses, and further, if the presence of childhood maltreatment moderated the relation between paternal emotion dysregulation and emotion socialization. METHOD: Participants were 337 fathers of children aged 6-10, recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and the social media site Reddit. Fathers completed self-report questionnaires about demographics, trauma history, emotion regulation difficulties, and emotion socialization. Linear regressions were conducted to determine if maltreatment history was related to emotion socialization, and maltreatment history was examined as a moderator between emotion regulation and emotion socialization in fathers. RESULTS: Childhood maltreatment history was not associated with either supportive or unsupportive emotion socialization, though greater lifetime cumulative trauma was related to less unsupportive emotion socialization. Maltreatment history moderated the association between emotion regulation and unsupportive emotion socialization, such that emotion dysregulation was more strongly associated with more unsupportive emotion socialization among fathers who experienced maltreatment. CONCLUSION: The presence of a maltreatment history may be important to consider when determining how emotion dysregulation influences parenting behaviors, particularly the more unsupportive emotion socialization behaviors. Other areas implicated in trauma sequela, such as interpersonal effectiveness, could be fruitful avenues for further elucidating how trauma impacts paternal emotion socialization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).