As part of her PhD and under Prof. Jolene Van der Kaap-Deeder’s supervision, Deniz Çetin examines parental reminiscing styles and how they relate to children’s emotion regulation. Conversations that children have with their parents are important for their social-emotional development - especially conversations about their past emotional experiences. When parents are more elaborative (i.e., providing structure and information) and more autonomy supportive (i.e., supporting the child’s volitional functioning) while reminiscing about these experiences with their child, this positively relates to their child’s social-cognitive development.

According to the Self-Determination Theory, children with highly autonomy supportive parents tend to develop adaptive emotion regulation skills. Developing adaptive emotion regulation skills is vital for children’s social-emotional adjustment. Yet, little is known about how autonomy supportive reminiscing relates to the development of emotion regulation in children. Thus, the first aim of this PhD project is to examine longitudinally how differences in parents’ reminiscing style - elaboration and autonomy support - relate to the development of emotion regulation in children. In addition, while accumulating evidence shows that parents differ in their reminiscing style, what leads to these differences has received less attention. Therefore, the second aim is to examine what motivates parents to employ different communication styles when reminiscing with their child thereby employing a diary design.

As part of her PhD and under Prof. Jolene Van der Kaap-Deeder’s supervision, Gulsen Guldeste’s project focuses on how young adults who differ in individualistic and collectivistic cultural orientations perceive and regulate their emotions in response to parental guilt-induction. Parental guilt-induction is an internally controlling tactic which refers to parents’ use of guilt to pressure children from within to comply with parental demands. 

The child-rearing strategies that parents adopt differ across cultures. While some strategies (e.g., parental warmth, rejection) have universal implications, others (like guilt-induction) remain in a gray area. There are currently two main perspectives as to whether the effects of such parenting practices as guilt-induction are similar across cultures. From a universalistic perspective, based on the Self-Determination Theory, parental guilt-induction is expected to frustrate children’s basic, universal psychological needs (i.e., autonomy, competence, relatedness), hence lead to maladjustment regardless of one’s cultural orientation. On the other hand, a culture-relativistic perspective proposes that the effects of guilt-induction are dependent on the cultural context. It is suggested that guilt-induction is a frequently-used, normative socialization practice that is compatible with collectivistic cultural values and parental socialization goals, hence reflecting parental care and involvement, rather than parental negativity. So, the role of culture in the effects of parental guilt-induction in children’s functioning is a debated topic.

Accordingly, this project aims to contribute to this debate by exploring whether cultural orientation as well as the presence of maternal warmth moderate the relations between maternal guilt-induction and youth’s functioning. Young adults from Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey filled out questionnaires in the first study part of this PhD project, in which they were randomly assigned to one of the three vignette conditions reflecting maternal autonomy-support, guilt-induction with warmth and guilt-induction without warmth. They indicated situational perceived parenting, situational emotion regulation strategies, situational need satisfaction and need frustration and baseline collectivism.

In this project, Nureda Taşkesen (PhD student), Elena Hernandez (post-doc), and Jolene van der Kaap-Deeder (the project manager) together with an international group of collaborators aims to enrich our understanding of a newly coined concept: Emotion crafting. 

Emotion crafting offers a new perspective on individuals’ emotion regulation. How individuals identify, experience, adjust and express their emotions – emotion regulation – is one of the central factors affecting psychological well-being. Thus far, the conceptualization of emotion regulation has mostly been focused on individuals’ reactions in response to emotion-eliciting events, thereby assigning a reactive role to individuals. Notably, emotion crafting highlights individuals’ proactive role in their emotional well-being. Emotion crafting is defined as proactive behavior (i.e., anticipatory, deliberate and self-initiated behavior) seeking to maintain or increase positive feelings, such as consciously choosing to spend time with people whom one feels good. 

This project will investigate the antecedents (i.e., adolescent, parent, teacher factors) as well as the outcomes (e.g., self-esteem, symptoms of psychopathology, emotional functioning) of emotion crafting among late adolescents (starting around the age of 18). While doing so, it will employ data from and extend the Trondheim Early Secure Study (TESS). Considering the culturally varied nature of emotional development, cross-cultural comparisons will be made by collecting data in diverse countries.

This project was awarded funding of an amount of 800,000 NOK from the Research Council of Norway, under the Researcher Project for Young Talents scheme. 

SAFE-SORRY research project

This study aims to investigate the concept of intensive parenting (IP), which emphasizes a high level of maternal involvement in childcare. While previous research has explored this concept, there remains a lack of clarity around its core components and how they relate to established parenting styles, such as warmth, monitoring, and psychological control. To address this gap, the study builds on a prior project conducted in Poland, where a new Intensive Parenting Behaviours (IPB) self-report measure was developed. The current study extends this research to Northern Europe by focusing on Norwegian mothers. It seeks to explore how the components of intensive parenting may vary across cultural contexts, particularly by translating the IPB scale into Norwegian and examining its validity within the Norwegian cultural framework.

The study, part of a larger cross-cultural project led by Prof. Dr. Katarzyna Lubiewska from the University of Warsaw, involves data collection from several countries. In Norway, the national team is led by Assoc. Prof. Jolene van der Kaap-Deeder (NTNU), with PhD candidates Deniz Çetin and Nureda Taşkesen actively involved. The key objectives include testing how the Norwegian IPB scale aligns with traditional parenting dimensions and exploring the correlates of maternal IPB, such as maternal guilt, age, education, and child-related factors like sex and educational challenges. Additionally, the study will examine broader national-level factors, such as economic indicators (e.g., GDP, income inequality) and cultural systems (e.g., individualism), to better understand how societal factors influence intensive parenting in Norway.