A Meta-analytic Review of the Five Minute Speech Sample as a Measure of Family Emotional Climate for Youth: Relations with Internalizing and Externalizing Symptomatology

The Five Minute Speech Sample's (FMSS) measure of parental expressed emotion (EE), defined as criticism (CRIT) and emotional overinvolvement (EOI), has been increasingly used to measure family emotional climate in relation to youth psychopathological development. As CRIT and EOI were defined based on adults, a meta-analysis and systematic review was conducted to analyze the presence and strength of an effect among maternal CRIT and EOI with youth internalizing and externalizing problems. A random effects model was used to analyze the 42 studies on families of youth (aged 1.5 to 19). There was a small, significant relation among maternal CRIT with youth internalizing and externalizing problems and among EOI with youth internalizing problems. EOI was not significantly related to externalizing problems. The current study suggests that the FMSS measure of CRIT is a more robust correlate of youth internalizing and externalizing symptoms than EOI, but EOI does relate to internalizing behaviors. Few moderators emerged, highlighting a continued need to identify factors accounting for heterogeneity. The current results suggest that the FMSS measure of CRIT may be a valuable measure of the family emotional climate in families of youth, but care should be taken when including analyses on EOI.