It's hard to say: The challenge of connecting emotions and language for first time mothers

This investigation was driven by the question: How does the capacity to verbally communicate subjective experiences, including emotions, affect the ways that people interact with others? A theoretical construct for "good enough mothering" was created, which was comprised of two affect themes of angry and frightening incidents, and two child-care themes of bedding and toileting. The speech patterns of 4 first time mothers were analyzed when talking about these 4 different themes. Two types of measures were used: (1) a set of computerized linguistic measures developed to measure the referential process, and applied using the Discourse Attributes Analysis Program (DAAP) and (2) an emotional interaction measure, which focused on emotional attunement and emotional regulation of the child by the mother.; The findings for the linguistic measures showed that, overall, the mothers had more difficulty talking about the two affect themes, compared to the two child-care themes. The emotional interaction measure showed that the mothers had difficulty functioning in situations involving anger, and handled frightening situations with greater ease. This lack of convergence was discussed from several perspectives.; The first perspective was that the mothers may have been more self-critical when faced with situations involving anger, as compared to anxiety, because anger is not generally accepted in women due to gender stereotyping. It is also possible that gender stereotyping may have affected the ratings of the judges, who were all women, in a similar way. From another perspective, it is possible that the mothers may have been similarly engaged in the topics of anger and anxiety, but that differences in attachment patterns could have led them to handle situations differently as a result of being better attuned and more capable of emotional regulation in the presence of anxiety, when compared to situations involving anger.; Directions for future research were discussed with the possibility of further utilizing the current data, along with putting forward ideas for other study designs that stem from the implications of the current study.