Previous research has highlighted the important role of parental emotions in parent–child interactions and child development. The present study presents the Parental Feelings Inventory (PFI), a new rating scale designed to assess parental emotions within the parenting role. The PFI presents emotion adjectives and asks parents to indicate the degree to which they experience that emotion in their role as parents. This study investigates the factor analytic structure and psychometric properties of this scale in a sample of parents with 3-year-old children. Participants included 149 mothers and 107 fathers of preschool-age children. The results provide support for a three-factor solution (Angry, Happy, and Anxious/Sad). This scale demonstrated good reliability and correlated with other measures of parent and child functioning. These findings provide support for the overall utility of the PFI as a measure of emotional experiences in the parenting role.
