Abstract
Impaired social skills, communication difficulties, and lower emotion regulation are commonly known characteristics pertaining to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The parent-child relationship has an important and critical role in shaping aspects of the child’s developmental process, especially for emotion regulation. Parents’ regulatory facilitation strategies during moments of high arousal are important contributors to the development of children’s emotion regulatory skills. Children with ASD may require more emotional attunement and prompting by parents. However, this may be deterred by the negative emotional climate that may result from the greater stress known to occur in families of children with ASD. Further, high negative affect in the home may increase the development of dysregulated affect that is not appropriate for the given emotional context, which we term “context-inappropriate” (CI). In this study of 5- to 9-year-olds with high-functioning autism (HFA), almost all parents endorsed CI anger in their child. Parents of children who expressed more CI anger reported greater social stress. This study also examined three parental factors that may influence this tendency for children with HFA to show CI anger. As expected, parents with more negative affect had children with greater CI anger. Further, children who had greater emotional responses showed more CI anger if parents showed lower levels of sensitivity. Whereas CI anger was not associated with emotional behavior in children with highly sensitive parents. These findings increase our understanding of ways that emotion can be dysregulated in children with HFA and some important parental emotional factors associated with this dysregulation.