The role of marriage satisfaction and psychological resilience in predicting parents' emotional socialization behaviors

This research was conducted to determine the role of marital satisfaction and psychological resilience in predicting parents' emotional socialization behaviors. In addition, the relationship between emotional socialization, marital satisfaction and psychological resilience of parents and whether they differ according to gender were also examined. The study group of the research consists of married mothers and fathers who have children in the preschool period (36-72 months). Research data was collected from 340 parents whose children were attending pre-school education in the Adapazarı, Arifiye, Erenler, Kaynarca, Serdivan districts of Sakarya in the 2024-2025 fall semester. 300 of these parents (88.2%) are mothers and 40 (11.8%) are fathers. In the study, data on parents' psychological resilience was obtained using the "Brief Resilience Scale" (Doğan, 2015), data on marital satisfaction was obtained using the "Marital Life Scale" (Tezer, 1996) , and data on emotional socialization behaviors was obtained using the " Coping With Children's Negative Emotions Scale - CCNES" (Yağmurlu ve Altan, 2010) . Additionally, "Personal Information Form" was used as a data collection tool to determine the demographic characteristics of the participants. In the study, whether psychological resilience, marital satisfaction and emotional socialization behaviors in parents showed a significant difference according to gender was analyzed with an independent sample t-test. The findings from the result of Pearson's Correlation were examined in order to reveal the relationship between the variables and multiple regression analysis was used to test whether psychological resilience and marital satisfaction predict emotional socialization behaviors. According to the results obtained from the research, a low level negative significant relationship was obtained between both marital satisfaction and psychological resilience and unsupportive emotion socialization reactions such as distress-anxiety reactions and punitive reactions. While a low level positive significant relationship was determined between marital satisfaction and supportive emotion socialization responses (encouraging emotion expression, emotion-focused responses and problem-focused responses), no significant relationship was determined between psychological resilience and supportive emotion socialization responses. As a result of the Multiple Regression Analysis conducted to determine whether psychological resilience and marital satisfaction predict emotion socialization behaviors, it is seen that the total scores of marital satisfaction and psychological resilience significantly explain the scores of punitive reactions, encouraging emotional expression, emotion-focused reactions, and problem-focused reactions from the emotion socialization sub-dimensions. When the t-test results regarding the significance of the regression coefficients are examined, it is seen that while psychological resilience is a significant predictor of the distress-anxiety reactions sub-dimension, marital satisfaction is not a significant predictor of the distress-anxiety reactions sub-dimension. Additionally, marital satisfaction was found to be a significant predictor of supportive emotion socialization responses (encouragement of emotion expression, emotion-focused responses, and problem-focused responses), whereas psychological resilience was not a significant predictor of supportive emotion socialization responses. According to the regression analyses conducted on mothers, it is seen that the total scores of marital satisfaction and psychological resilience significantly explain the scores of distress-anxiety reactions, punitive reactions, and problem-focused reactions from the emotional socialization sub-dimensions. When the t-test results regarding the significance of the regression coefficients were examined, it was found that psychological resilience in mothers was a significant predictor of the distress-anxiety reactions sub-dimension, while marital satisfaction was not a significant predictor of the distress-anxiety reactions sub-dimension. In addition, it was determined that while marital satisfaction in mothers was a significant predictor of the problem-focused responses sub-dimension, psychological resilience was not a significant predictor of the problem-focused responses sub-dimension. According to the results of the regression analysis conducted for fathers, it is seen that the total scores of marital satisfaction and psychological resilience significantly explain all sub-dimension scores expressing supportive emotion socialization reactions (encouraging emotion expression, emotion-focused reactions, problem-focused reactions). When the t-test results regarding the significance of the regression coefficients were examined, it was found that while marital satisfaction in fathers was a significant predictor of the sub-dimension of encouraging emotional expression, psychological resilience was not a significant predictor of the sub-dimension of encouraging emotional expression. In addition, while psychological resilience in fathers was a significant predictor of the emotion-focused reactions and problem-focused reactions sub-dimensions, marital satisfaction was not a significant predictor of the emotion-focused reactions and problem-focused reactions sub-dimensions. Keywords: emotional socialization, marital satisfaction, psychological resilience