From parental psychological control to hidden emotional pressure: a multimodal review of children's socio-emotional development

Multimodal data processing is becoming increasingly important in neuroscience and perception science because children's emotional and social experiences are rarely expressed through a single observable channel. In parent, child interaction, children may verbally comply with parental expectations while simultaneously showing subtle affective, behavioral, physiological, or neural signs of internal distress. This review examines parental psychological control as a hidden but developmentally significant context for multimodal assessment. Unlike behavioral control, which regulates children's external behavior through rules and supervision, psychological control intrudes into children's inner emotional world through guilt induction, love withdrawal, and intrusive parenting. This review first summarizes how parental psychological control may create hidden emotional pressure and undermine children's socio-emotional development. Guilt induction may increase self-blame and emotional over-responsibility, thereby weakening emotional autonomy. Love withdrawal may make children associate affection with obedience, increasing rejection fear and distorting empathic expression. Intrusive parenting may restrict independent decision-making and social problem-solving, thereby impairing social adaptation. These mechanisms suggest that children exposed to psychological control may appear outwardly calm, obedient, or well-adjusted while internally experiencing emotional inhibition, relational anxiety, and reduced agency. To address this hidden discrepancy, this review highlights the value of multimodal data processing for detecting implicit emotional burden in parent, child interaction. Potential indicators include facial micro-expressions, vocal changes, gaze avoidance, body movement, language patterns, physiological arousal, and neural signals related to emotional reactivity and regulatory effort. By integrating behavioral observation, affective computing, physiological sensing, and neurodevelopmental evidence, multimodal approaches may provide a more sensitive framework for understanding how psychologically controlling parenting shapes children's emotional autonomy, empathy, and social adaptation.