Putting on a happy face: emotional expression in parents of children with serious illness

Abstract

Context: Communication is widely acknowledged as a crucial component of high-quality pediatric medical care, which is provided in situations in which parents typically experience strong emotions.

Objectives: To explore emotion using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and a self-report questionnaire to better understand the relationship between these two measures of emotion in a pediatric care context.

Methods: Sixty-nine parents of 47 children who were participants in the Decision Making in Pediatric Palliative Care Study at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia took part in this study. Parents completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) and a semistructured interview about their children and experience with medical decision making. The transcribed interviews were analyzed with the LIWC program, which yields scores for positive and negative emotional expression. The association between LIWC and PANAS scores was evaluated using multivariate linear regression to adjust for potential confounders.

Results: Parents who used more positive words when speaking about the illnesses of their children and the experience of medical decision making were more likely to report lower levels of positive affect on the PANAS: increase in the standard deviation of positive emotional expression was associated with an unadjusted 7.4% decrease in the self-reported positive affect (P = 0.015) and an adjusted 7.0% decrease in the self-reported positive affect (P = 0.057) after modeling for potential confounders. Increase in the standard deviation of negative emotional expression was associated with an adjusted 9.4% increase in the self-reported negative affect (P = 0.036).

Conclusion: The inverse relationship between parents' positive emotional expression and their self-reported positive affect should remind both researchers and clinicians to be cognizant of the possibilities for emotional miscues, and consequent miscommunication, in the pediatric care setting.