Connection-Enhancing Emotions in Parent-Child Dyads Impacted by Addiction
Addiction and recovery unfold within relationships. For families, the effects of substance use—and of the trauma that often accompanies it—can extend across generations, influencing how parents and children communicate, regulate emotion, and experience connection. At the same time, family relationships may provide important resources for resilience and recovery.
In the MRI-funded project Connection-Enhancing Emotions in Parent–Child Dyads Impacted by Addiction, Dr. Andrea Hussong (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) examines how trauma influences the development and socialization of three relational emotions—gratitude, generosity, and affection—among children in families affected by addiction. The project asks how these emotions emerge through everyday parent–child interactions and whether they may contribute to stronger relationships and healthier emotional functioning.
Much of the research on children whose parents experience substance use disorders has understandably focused on risk. These children experience higher rates of trauma exposure and may be more vulnerable to difficulties in mental health, social functioning, and other developmental outcomes. This project complements that literature with a strengths-based perspective, examining relational capacities that may already exist within families and potentially support recovery.
The study builds on Dr. Hussong’s previous research on the development of gratitude in childhood. Within this framework, gratitude involves a process through which children notice that something meaningful has been received, understand the intentions of the person providing it, experience an emotional response, and express appreciation. Parents can support this development by modeling gratitude, creating opportunities to practice it, and helping children reflect on experiences of receiving and giving.
The current project extends this framework to families navigating addiction recovery and trauma and broadens the focus to include generosity and affection. A central question is how parents and children influence one another’s capacity to experience and express these connection-enhancing emotions.
The study includes 150 mother–child dyads from families in which a parent has received treatment for an alcohol or drug use disorder within the previous five years. Children are between six and twelve years old. Families participate in surveys, interviews, and two recorded parent–child interaction tasks designed to capture relational processes as they occur.
In one activity, mothers and children work collaboratively to reproduce designs using magnets. Researchers examine dimensions of the interaction including parental sensitivity, support for autonomy, emotional engagement, and positive and negative regard. In a second activity, mothers and children discuss previous experiences involving gratitude and ingratitude. These conversations allow the research team to examine not only what families discuss, but how parents invite reflection, listen to their children, share their own perspectives, and respond during emotionally meaningful exchanges.
The project also incorporates physiological measurement. Mothers wear heart-rate monitors during the interactions, allowing researchers to assess vagal tone, an indicator associated with emotion regulation and social engagement. Combining these data with behavioral observations provides an opportunity to examine how physiological regulation and relational behavior unfold together during parent–child interactions.
Importantly, the study takes a reciprocal approach. It examines whether mothers with stronger emotion regulation have children who express greater gratitude, generosity, and affection and whether these mothers engage in more supportive emotion-socialization practices. At the same time, the researchers ask whether children’s expressions of connection-enhancing emotions predict subsequent changes in mothers’ physiological regulation.
This bidirectional perspective situates emotion within the parent–child system rather than within either individual alone. Parents help shape children’s emotional development, but children’s responses may also influence parents’ emotional states and behaviors. The study further examines whether dyads characterized by stronger regulation and greater connection-enhancing emotion report healthier family relationships and more positive child outcomes, including social skills, prosocial behavior, and emotion regulation.
Findings from the project may inform the adaptation of an existing online program developed by Dr. Hussong and colleagues to help parents engage children in conversations about gratitude. The team plans to make these resources more responsive to families affected by trauma and addiction and to explore their potential integration into parenting and recovery programs.
By focusing on gratitude, generosity, and affection within everyday parent–child interactions, this project contributes to a relational understanding of resilience in families affected by addiction. Rather than defining recovery solely through the reduction of risk, it examines how reciprocal moments of connection may become resources through which parents and children support one another across generations.