ORIGINAL PAPER Mothers’ Expressed Emotion and Narrative Coherence: Associations with Preschoolers’ Behavior Problems in a Multiethnic Sample Efrat Sher-Censor • Tuppett M. Yates Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract This study integrated two views on parents’ nar- ratives regarding their child, the psychiatric model of expressed emotion (EE) and the attachment model of narrative coherence (NC), to examine common and unique associations of maternal EE and NC with preschoolers’ behavior problems across families from varied ethnicities. The five minute speech sam- ples (FMSSs) of 212 Hispanic (59.9 %), Black (18.9 %), and White (21.2 %) mothers were evaluated using Magana-Amato (Manual for coding expressed emotion from the five minute speech sample: UCLA family project, UCLA, Los Angeles, 1993) FMSS-EE coding protocol and a novel FMSS-NC cod- ing system. Preschoolers’ behavior problems were assessed with both maternal and observer reports. Across ethnic groups, EE positive comments were related to mother-ratings of fewer behavior problems, whereas NC was associated with observer- ratings of fewer behavior problems. EE negative comments were associated with mother-ratings of more behavior prob- lems, but only among White and Black mothers and not among Hispanic mothers. These findings illustrate the merits of inte- grating semantic and organizational dimensions of mothers’ narratives to understand children’s behavioral adjustment. Implications for research and practice are discussed with an emphasis on applications for developmentally and culturally sensitive work with families of preschoolers. Keywords FMSS expressed emotion Á Coherence Á Behavior problems Á Ethnicity Á Preschool Introduction Preschoolers’ behavior problems often persist into adoles- cence (Campbell 1995; Mesman et al. 2001) and predict other difficulties, such as academic and social problems (Qi and Kaiser 2003). Therefore, efforts to elucidate factors underlying preschoolers’ behavioral adjustment are of theoretical and practical importance. Parents’ representa- tions of their preschooler, as reflected in their narratives regarding the child, presumably guide the affective quality of the parent–child relationship and shape the emergence and maintenance of child behavioral adjustment (Caspi et al. 2004; Oppenheim 2006). As such, asking parents to narrate about their offspring is common in family research and practice (see Fiese and Spagnola 2005 for review). Yet there is no consensus regarding which specific features of the narrative (and their corresponding representations) are most strongly related to preschoolers’ behavioral adapta- tion. The psychiatric model emphasizes the affective con- tent of parental narratives via expressed emotion (EE; Hooley 2007), whereas attachment theory highlights the salience of parents’ narrative coherence (Oppenheim 2006) for understanding child adjustment. The concept of EE originated in adult psychiatry to assess the emotional content of caregivers’ narratives about a relative with mental illness. As assessed in the context of the five minute speech sample (FMSS; Magana et al. 1986), which prompts caregivers to describe their rela- tionship with the patient for 5 uninterrupted minutes, high EE characterizes narratives that are critical (i.e., commu- nicating dislike or disapproval) or emotionally overin- volved (i.e., communicating overprotection or exaggerated positivity). EE presumably reflects caregivers’ attributions regarding the patient, which in turn, guide their behavior towards the patient (Barrowclough and Hooley 2003). E. Sher-Censor (&) The Center for the Study of Child Development, University of Haifa, #6035 Rabin Building, Mount Carmel, 31905 Haifa, Israel e-mail: esher@psy.haifa.ac.il T. M. Yates Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA 123 J Child Fam Stud DOI 10.1007/s10826-014-9946-z