Preschool Children's Emotional Expressions with Peers: The Roles of Gender and Emotion Socialization

This study examined whether mothers and fathers reported using different emotion socialization strategies and whether these differences were related to preschoolers' gender and emotional expressiveness during peer play. Ninety percent of the children were Caucasian, 6% were Asian-American, and 4% were Mexican-American. The positive expressive behavior of 82 preschoolers participating in two conflict eliciting situations with two same gender peers were coded. The scores for the two sessions were averaged. All of the mothers and 63 of the fathers were administered three emotion socialization questionnaires. Results revealed that girls expressed more positive emotion than boys. In addition, mothers and fathers also reported using different emotion socialization practices and, in some cases, this was dependent upon their child's gender. The findings also showed that mothers' and fathers' reports of emotion socialization practices were differentially related to children's emotionally expressive behavior during peer play. In addition, fathers' emotion socialization practices accounted for unique variance in children's emotionally expressive behavior over and above that explained by the maternal emotion socialization variables. These findings highlight the importance of mothers' and fathers' emotion socialization practices for preschoolers' emotional competence in emotionally challenging situations with peers.     

The Relation of Emotion Knowledge to Coping in European American and Chinese Immigrant Children

Emotion knowledge contributes to emotion regulation and coping among adults, but few studies have investigated its role in children’s coping development, especially in a cross-cultural context. We examine relations between children’s emotion knowledge and coping in European American and Chinese immigrant families. One hundred and three 7- to 10-year-old children and their mothers from European American and Chinese cultural background participated in this study. Children's emotion knowledge was assessed using emotion-situation knowledge production task. This task examines their understanding of situational antecedents o discrete emotions. Children’s use of coping strategies was reported by mothers using the Children’s Coping Strategies Checklist. Results showed that Chinese immigrant children had greater emotion knowledge of fear and pride but were reported using less variety of coping strategies than European American children. The relationship between children’s knowledge of self-conscious emotions and their use of distraction coping strategies was moderated by culture, whereby knowledge of self-conscious emotions was negatively associated with the parent-reported distraction strategies only for European American children but not for Chinese immigrant children. The importance of culture in both theory and practice related to emotion knowledge and coping is discussed. Findings in this study suggest that family intervention and children’s emotion training programs may need to consider children’s cultural background.     

Ethnic Differences in the Relation Between Parental Emotion Socialization and Mental Health in Emerging Adults

The present study examined the relation between retrospectively reported parental emotion socialization practices and emerging adults’ mental health across four ethnic groups. Participants were 112 European American, 89 Latino/a American, 82 African American/Black, and 83 Asian American emerging adults. Participants completed questionnaires assessing current mental health symptoms and retrospective reports of parents’ responses to their expression of negative affect as adolescents. Fathers’ socialization practices were associated with emerging adults’ functioning across ethnic groups, but the relation between mothers’ socialization and emerging adults’ functioning varied across ethnic groups. Supportive practices were significantly associated with fewer symptoms in emerging adults only for Latino/a American families, and unsupportive practices were associated with more symptoms in emerging adults only for European American and African American/Black families. Results point to the importance of parental emotion socialization practices during adolescence for emerging adults’ well-being, but suggest that some practices may be more important than others depending on cultural background.     

A Multi-Method,Multi-Informant Test of Maternal Emotion Socialization in Relation to Adolescent Fears of Social Evaluation

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Fears of negative and positive social evaluation are considered potential transdiagnostic mechanisms underpinning multiple internalizing disorders...     

幼儿情绪调节策略与气质的相关研究

运用自编的幼儿情绪调节策略调查问卷和儿童气质问卷(PTQ)对幼儿进行研究,结果发现:除自我安慰外,其它各种情绪调节策略都与气质的某些维度存在不同程度的相关,不同气质类型的幼儿在问题解决和被动应付这两种调节策略的运用中存在显著差异.此外,5岁的难养型幼儿对替代调节策略的运用显著多于同年龄的易养型幼儿.     

Stability of Emotion Talk in Families from the Toddler to the Preschool Years

A substantial disparity exists for academic achievement in science between Black and White primary-school children. A similar gap exists between boys and girls. The extent to which secondary education influences these achievement gaps has not been established. The authors report analyses showing how these science achievement gaps change as a function of secondary education. Analyses of data from a large, nationally representative longitudinal study of academic achievement showed that racial disparities and disparities associated with gender continue to increase throughout high school.     

Emotion Socialization in the Context of Family Risks: Links to Child Emotion Regulation

The current study expands upon the extant literature by examining the influence of contextual risk factors (e.g., parental psychological distress, household income, educational attainment) on parental responses to children’s emotional experiences. Participants included 97 ethnically and demographically diverse mother–child dyads with children ranging in age from 7 to 12. Mothers reported indicators of supportive and unsupportive emotion socialization practices, and measures of child emotion regulation and emotion dysregulation. Higher scores on the familial risk index were positively related to increased emotion dysregulation and negatively related to decreased emotion regulation through mediated effects of mothers’ unsupportive reactions to children’s negative emotional expressions. These findings suggest the importance of considering contextual influences on the emotion socialization process and offer potential avenues to foster adaptive emotional development in the context of high risk.     

Emotion Socialization in Cross‐Cultural Perspective

Emotion socialization aims to promote children’s emotion competence. Children’s competence is embedded in cultural contexts that influence caregivers’ expectations of appropriateness of children’s expression and experience of emotions. Two aspects of emotion competence – individualistic and relational emotion competence – are outlined. They offer a theoretical framework to interpret cultural commonalities and differences in emotion socialization strategies. This review summarizes current knowledge about caregivers’ emotion socialization strategies toward children’s negative emotional expressions and related behaviors in cultural perspective. The number of empirical studies in cultures outside of United States remains low. Nonetheless, the available evidence describes a range of emotion socialization strategies that are embedded in caregiving, and their consequences for children’s emotion development. Besides several commonalities across cultures, we describe differences in the degree to which strategies are endorsed by caregivers as well as some of the qualitative information that point to cultural variations. Finally, we note gaps in the literature and suggest future research directions.     

Maternal Emotion Dysregulation Predicts Emotion Socialization Practices and Adolescent Emotion Lability: Conditional Effects of Youth ADHD Symptoms

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Maternal emotional functioning and emotion socialization practices can facilitate or hinder children’s emotional development, and youth with...     

The Association Between Observed Parental Emotion Socialization and Adolescent Self-Medication

The current study examined the moderating influence of observed parental emotion socialization (PES) on self-medication in adolescents. Strengths of the study include the use of a newly developed observational coding system further extending the study of PES to adolescence, the use of an experience sampling method to assess the daily covariation between negative affect and substance use, and a focus on PES styles defined by the interaction of emotion-dismissing and emotion-coaching behaviors. Using multi-leveling modeling, we tested PES as a moderator of daily negative mood-substance use relation in a sample of 65 elevated-risk adolescents (48% male, 58% Caucasian, with a median age of 14). Results showed a three-way interaction between emotion-coaching PES, emotion-dismissing PES and daily negative mood in predicting daily substance use. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of PES styles and their effects on self-medication through compromised emotion regulation and interpersonal processes.

Longitudinal Links among Mother and Child Emotion Regulation,Maternal Emotion Socialization,and Child Anxiety

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Models of transdiagnostic family emotion processes recognize parents’ emotion-related characteristics and behaviors as key contributors to...     

Maternal Emotion Socialization of Adolescent Girls Engaging in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Non-suicidal self injury (NSSI) is a transdiagnostic maladaptive behavior that is highly prevalent in adolescence. A greater understanding of the...     

Emotion Socialization in Families of Children With an Anxiety Disorder

Compared emotion socialization in 26 children with anxiety disorders ages 8–12 years and their mothers to 26 nonclinical counterparts without psychopathology. Children and their mothers participated in an emotion interaction task in which they discussed occasions when the child felt worry, sadness, and anger. Responses were coded for length of discussion, proportion of words spoken by child vs. mother, frequency of positive and negative emotion words, explanatory discussion of emotion, and maternal facilitation of emotion discussion. Children and their mothers also completed the Expressiveness and Control scales of the Family Environment Scale. Results indicated that mothers of children with an anxiety disorder spoke less frequently than their child, used significantly fewer positive emotion words, and discouraged their childrens emotion discussions more than did mothers of nonclinical children. Nonclinical children and their mothers indicated significantly more emotional expressiveness in their families than did children with an anxiety disorder and their mothers. These results highlight the potential role of truncated family emotional expressivity in the emotional development and functioning of children with an anxiety disorder.     

Socialization of Emotion and Offspring Internalizing Symptoms in Mothers with Childhood-Onset Depression

This study examines how mothers with and without a history of childhood-onset depression respond to their 3-9 year-old children's emotions. Mother-child dyads included 55 offspring of mothers with a history of childhood-onset depressive disorders and 57 offspring of never-depressed mothers. Mothers with a history of childhood depression were less likely than control mothers to respond in supportive ways to their children's negative emotions and were more likely to magnify, punish, or neglect their children's negative emotions. Magnification, neglect, and punishment of children's negative emotions were concurrently associated with children's internalizing symptoms, and neglect and punishment were associated with internalizing over a one year follow-up. Maternal neglect of children's negative emotion was positively associated with later internalizing symptoms for children who already had higher internalizing symptoms at the initial assessment. Findings suggest that atypical socialization of emotion may be one mechanism in the development of internalizing disorders.     

Correction to: A Family Socialization Model of Transdiagnostic Risk for Psychopathology in Preschool Children

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-021-00812-1     

Parental Emotion Socialization in Clinically Depressed Adolescents: Enhancing and Dampening Positive Affect

This study compared parental socialization of adolescent positive affect in families of depressed and healthy adolescents. Participants were 107 adolescents (42 boys) aged 14 – 18 years and their parents. Half of the participants met criteria for major depressive disorder and the others were demographically matched adolescents without emotional or behavioral disorders. Results based on multi-source questionnaire and interview data indicated that mothers and fathers of depressed adolescents were less accepting of adolescents’ positive affect and more likely to use strategies that dampen adolescents’ positive affect than were parents of healthy adolescents. Additionally, fathers of depressed adolescents exhibited fewer responses likely to enhance the adolescents’ positive affect than were fathers of healthy adolescents. These findings build on those of previous work in examining parental responses to adolescent emotions, focusing on positive emotions and including both mothers and fathers.