These findings suggest that the expression and regulation
of negative emotion is crucial to parent–child relationships
generally and to their conflict interactions in
particular. We thus decided to use negative emotion as a
marker for the occurrence of a relatively intense and
potentially problematic conflict. We are not aware of any
research to date that has used emotion as the sole determinant
of the presence of such conflicts and, consequently,
the present study is unique in doing so Starting and Ending Conflicts