An experimental manipulation of cognitive appraisals in parental burnout

Introduction "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so", Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, 239-251. Not less than four centuries ago, when the English virtuoso of literature, William Shakespeare, wrote these famous lines, he serendipitously laid the foundation of a concept rooted in cognitive psychology theories since 1960’s: cognitive appraisal, that is, the subjective interpretation of an objective situation (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). While the reader might consider the subtlety of English literature being rather far removed from the daily hassles of raising children, the following might help him or her reconsider. In a less literary but equally moving style, a 21st century anonymous exhausted father confides: “I tend to see the glass half empty when it comes to my children. My friends tell me that my children are no more difficult than anyone else's (...) My wife tells me that our children are doing well at school, that they are healthy and that they are just children. What I see is that they don’t seem to listen to me nor obey to me. It’s always a struggle. Every day the same struggle. I'm not doing well. I can't stand my children anymore. I simply can’t take it any more”. Parental burnout is defined as a specific syndrome occurring in response to severe parenting stress that chronically overwhelms the parent’s resources to cope (Mikolajczak et al., 2019; Mikolajczak et al., 2021). Parental burnout specifically hinges on four core symptoms: intense exhaustion resulting from one’s parental role, perceived saturation with- and loss of fulfillment in- one’s parental role, emotional distancing from one’s children and striking perceived contrast between previous and current parental self (Mikolajczak et al., 2018; Roskam et al., 2018). The syndrome is receiving more and more attention from scholars worldwide since a significant number of parents are affected across countries (Roskam et al., 2021). What is more, the consequences associated with parental burnout are dramatic both for the parent and the child. The former being in poor physical and/or mental health (Brianda et al., 2020) and the latter being sometimes exposed to violent and/or neglectful treatments from his or her exhausted parent (Hansotte et al., 2020; Mikolajczak et al., 2019). Due to the dire consequences associated with parental burnout, much of the research in the field has focused on identifying the antecedents of the syndrome. Hence, research has hastened to understand (better) the antecedents of parental burnout so as to develop both (better) prevention avenues and treatment options for the syndrome. Initially, research focused on objective life conditions of the parents, that is, sociodemographic predictors (viz. number and age of the children, living surface area, net household income, hours spent with the children, etc.). Surprisingly and counter-intuitively, studies accumulated all over the world repeatedly showed that these sociodemographic characteristics only accounted for a small proportion of explained variance in parental burnout (Arikan et al., 2020; Gannage et al., 2020; Matias et al., 2020; Mikolajczak et al., 2021; Mousavi et al., 2020; Roskam et al., 2021; Stanculescu et al., 2020; Szczygiel et al., 2020). The above cited research on parental burnout further investigated other types of antecedents, of which the parent’s emotional intelligence (e.g., the parent’s emotion regulation abilities), parenting factors (e.g., child-rearing practices efficacy) and family functioning factors (e.g., co-parental support). Interestingly, the predictive weight of these factors was much higher than that of sociodemographic factors. This raises the question of whether –compared to sociodemographic features– emotional intelligence factors, parenting factors and family functioning factors objectively play a greater role in predicting parental burnout than sociodemographic characteristics, or whether the higher predictive power of emotional intelligence factors, parenting factors and family functioning factors is explained by the fact that they are measured in a way that reflects the subject’s perception. This question (i.e., the role possibly played by perceptions in parental burnout) legitimately needs addressing in the context of parental burnout for both theoretical and empirical reasons. At the theoretical level, it has been shown that perceptions (and cognitions more generally) play a crucial role in emotions and (mental) health (Aafjes-van Doorn et al., 2020; Thornton & Andersen, 2006; Valiente et al., 2014). Furthermore, it is largely acknowledged since Lazarus and Folkman’s Transactional Model (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) that it is not the stressor/the situation per se that causes the individual to experience negative emotions, but the ensuing cognitive process itself, which is determined by the interplay between the characteristics of the individual and those of the situation. Thus, it is the cognitive process, rather than the situation itself, that will trigger an emotional response (Siemer et al., 2007). From an empirical viewpoint, it is puzzling that the instrument used to measure parents’ balance between risks (parental stress-aggravating factors) and resources (parental stress-relieving factors), namely the Balance Between Risks and Resources (BR2) (Mikolajczak & Roskam, 2018) present extremely high reliability indexes (personal communication by M.M., last author of the present article). Indeed, since the BR2 instrument theoretically measures distinct factors (that do not necessarily have to co-vary), we do not expect a high internal consistency. Therefore, the very high internal consistency of the scale suggests that a latent factor (possibly the subject's perception) might explain the high covariation between the responses to the items which the BR2 instruments entails. Hence, the above mentioned theoretical and empirical observations prompted us to examine the impact of cognitive appraisals in parental burnout. This impact appears all the more likely as research pertaining to job burnout showed that cognitions play a crucial role in the onset and maintenance of job burnout. Specifically, studies highlighted that occupational stress is positively related to job burnout by virtue of cognitive appraisals (Chang, 2009; Gomes et al., 2013; Thornton, 1992). Additional studies explored the predictive weight of perceived versus objective work overload and it emerged that the former explained significantly more variance in occupational burnout than the latter (Shirom et al., 2006; Shirom et al., 1997). As far as parental burnout is concerned, a preliminary study conducted during the Covid-19 global pandemic (Woine et al., 2022) shows that cognitive appraisals play both a moderating and mediating role in parental burnout, thereby suggesting that cognitive appraisals may be operative in parental burnout. Nevertheless, this study being correlational in design, it precludes any causal interpretation. The present study aims to investigate the causal role of cognitive appraisals in parental burnout through an experimental manipulation of the former. Several studies in the field of emotion and cognitive science more broadly showed that it is possible to manipulate appraisals (Lamm et al., 2007; Lang et al., 2009; O’Connor et al., 2010; Roseman & Evdokas, 2004; van de Ven et al., 2012; van Steenbergen et al., 2008). In the present study, we will use autobiographic memory priming to manipulate parents’ appraisals of three factors known to weigh heavily in predicting parental burnout (i.e., perceived co-parental support, perceived emotional competence and perceived efficiency of parenting practices) and investigate the impact of this between-subject manipulation on pre-post parental burnout scores. Our hypotheses are as follows: 1. Compared to control subjects, we expect participants assigned to each of the three experimental conditions respectively (i.e., perceived co-parenting support, perceived emotional regulation abilities and perceived efficiency of child-rearing practices) to display a decrease in parental burnout scores from pre- to post-manipulation measure. 2. We do not necessarily expect any statistically significant difference in parental burnout difference scores between the three experimental conditions (i.e., perceived co-parenting support, perceived emotional regulation abilities and perceived efficiency of child-rearing practices). Should they emerge, differences between experimental conditions may suggest that some factors are more subject to appraisal manipulation than others, and future studies would then be needed to go deeper into this finding.