Emotional Resilience in Early Childhood

Abstract

To test whether the development of emotional resilience is a function of sensitive caregiving and child negative affect, we tested the joint contributions of 7-month maternal sensitivity and infant negative affect to the prediction of 33-month emotional resilience across the first 3 years of life. The aims of this study were to examine whether maternal sensitivity and infant negative affect predict long-term emotional resilience and whether this was associated with preschool behavior problems. Using a sample of 181 mother–infant dyads, we found that ( a ) maternal sensitivity at 7 months, but not infant negative affect, longitudinally predicted emotional resilience during preschool and ( b ) emotional resilience was negatively associated with anxiety/depression in preschool.