A test of potential mediators of narrative coherence in preschool children exposed to domestic violence

The purpose of this study was to better understand the impact of domestic violence on emotion regulation by examining the relationships between maternal posttraumatic stress, maternal emotion coaching, and child narrative coherence in an extant sample of mothers and children exposed to domestic violence.; Participants were 44 preschool-aged children and their mothers. Of the 44 dyads, 23 were from families exposed to domestic violence and 21 were from a non-exposed sample. Child narrative coherence was coded from videotaped sessions and transcripts of children's play narratives from the Mac Arthur Story-Stem Battery (Bretherton, Oppenheim, Buchsbaum, Emde, & the MacArthur Narrative Group. (I 990a). Data on posttraumatic stress was collected from semi-structured interviews with the mothers, utilizing the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (Blake et al., 1995). Data on meta-emotion coaching was collected and coded from transcripts of mothers' audio taped interviews of Katz and Gottman's (1986) Meta-Emotion Interview. The relationships between maternal posttraumatic stress, maternal emotion coaching, and child narrative coherence were examined utilizing Baron and Kenny's (1986) model for mediator relationships. As expected, the predication of children's narrative coherence scores by children's verbal IQ was statistically significant. However, when the children's verbal IQ scores were controlled, the results of the hierarchical regression analyses of the hypotheses were insignificant. The mothers' PTSD symptoms were unrelated to the mothers' ability to coach their children during emotional experiences and mothers' PTSD symptoms were unrelated to children's narrative coherence. Since the severity of the mothers' traumatization also did not significantly predict the mothers' ability to emotionally coach their children, the mediator relationship was not analyzed. Studies have shown that examining the coherence of children's stories provides a greater understanding of children's experiences. The present study contributed to the limited information on the study of narrative coherence and emotion coaching with children and mothers exposed to domestic violence. A similar approach has not previously been explained in the literature, which suggests a need for further research in this area to better understand the underlying processes between maternal psychopathology and child narrative coherence. This knowledge can facilitate improved communication, adjustment, and functioning in children.