The Impact of Emotion Network Density on Psychological Distress in Chinese Parents of Children with Autism: A Daily Diary Study.

Abstract

Parents of children with autism often experience a wide range of emotions in their daily lives. However, previous research has primarily focused on average levels of emotional challenges, neglecting the significance of daily emotion dynamics that may underlie parental psychological functioning. This study adopted a dynamic network approach to examine the strength of temporal connections within and between various emotions-referred to as emotion network density-and further explore its impacts on parental psychological distress. Participants included 76 Chinese parents (M = 36.36 years, SD = 3.95 years; 58 mothers) of children with autism. Parents reported their psychological distress at baseline and then completed measures of daily emotions over a 14-day period. The densities of overall, positive, and negative emotion networks were estimated using the Multilevel Vector Auto-Regression model. The results indicated that higher densities of the overall and negative emotion networks were associated with increased stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms in parents. Further analysis of network components showed that the in-strength of fear and guilt (i.e., their likelihood of being affected by other emotions) and the out-strength of anger and guilt (i.e., their capacity to influence other emotions) were positively related to parental psychological distress. However, neither the overall density of the positive emotion network nor its specific components showed a significant relationship with parental psychological distress. These findings highlight the importance of considering the daily dynamics of emotions, particularly negative emotions, from a network perspective to better understand the development of psychological distress in parents of children with autism.