Children's Emotional Regulation and Social Competence in Middle Childhood

SUMMARY

Associations among parental behaviors, children's emotional reactivity, and dimensions of children's social competence were examined. Fourth grade children (N = 103) and their parents participated in a laboratory discussion task. Parent-child relationship qualities, parental emotion socialization behaviors, measures of children's emotional regulatory abilities, and social competence (assessed by teachers and peers) were obtained. Results indicated that parents' behaviors in the discussion task were related to both children's emotional and social competence. Both mothers' and fathers' behaviors were linked to children's emotional regulatory abilities and social competence. In addition, children's emotional regulation was related to children's social competence. Only limited evidence of the mediating role of emotion regulation was found. Implications for relative roles of mothers and fathers in the emergence of emotional and social competence were noted.     

Children's Expression of Emotional Meaning in Music Through Expressive Body Movement

Recent research has demonstrated that preschool children can decode emotional meaning in expressive body movement; however, to date, no research has considered preschool children's ability to encode emotional meaning in this media. The current study investigated 4- (N = 23) and 5- (N = 24) year-old children's ability to encode the emotional meaning of an accompanying music segment by moving a teddy bear using previously modeled expressive movements to indicate one of four target emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, or fear). Adult judges visually categorized the silent videotaped expressive movement performances by children of both ages with greater than chance level accuracy. In addition, accuracy in categorizing the emotion being expressed varied as a function of age of child and emotion. A subsequent cue analysis revealed that children as young as 4 years old were systematically varying their expressive movements with respect to force, rotation, shifts in movement pattern, tempo, and upward movement in the process of emotional communication. The theoretical significance of such encoding ability is discussed with respect to children's nonverbal skills and the communication of emotion.     

The Contribution of Older Siblings' Reactions to Emotions to Preschoolers' Emotional and Social Competence

SUMMARY

According to Tompkins' (1991) theory on the socialization of emotion, young children's emotional and social competence are influenced by others' reactions to the children's emotions. Patterns of parental reactions to emotions have been shown to account for significant variance in preschoolers' emotion and social competence. However, the impact of others significant in the preschooler's life has been largely ignored. To help fill this gap, associations were examined between older siblings' reactions to 41 preschoolers' emotions and the preschoolers' social-emotional competence (i.e., affective balance, emotion knowledge, positive, prosocial, and provocative responding to peers' emotions, sociometric likability, and teacher-rated social competence). Using a multiple regression strategy, the contributions of sibling reactions and moderating demographic variables to preschooler emotional and social competence were evaluated. Certain sibling reactions, especially positive emotional responsiveness, were shown to play important roles. Many predictions were moderated by age of child, sex of one dyad member     

‘Putting Humpty Together Again’: Working With Parents to Help Children Who Have Experienced Early Trauma

Early interpersonal trauma can have a profound impact on young children's emotional, cognitive and physical function, and on their ongoing development. This article outlines the diverse effects of trauma and how they might present in school or childcare settings. It considers the role of the family in the development of children's emotion regulation, especially if trauma occurs in the context of the family and how trauma affects family dynamics. A therapeutic approach is then outlined to help address the multiple areas of difficulty. Work with parents and the whole family is aimed at maintaining physical and emotional safety and building trust between parent and child. Work with the parents, teachers and the child individually is directed at helping the child develop emotion regulation and competence physically, cognitively and interpersonally.     

Attachment Themes in the Family Narratives of Preschool Children: A Qualitative Analysis

The family narratives of two preschool children (male and female) rated extremely high in social competence were compared to the narratives of two other children (also male and female) rated extremely low in social competence for differences in qualities of parent-child relationships and narrative structure. The children were participants in a larger study of parent-child relationships in post-divorce families. Three narratives of the ten-narrative Attachment Story Completion Task-Revised were analyzed qualitatively. Differences between children rated high and low in social competence were observed in areas such as the representation of problem resolutions, narrative coherence, predictable consequences for behavior, role modeling, responsiveness of parents to children's needs, emotional expression, children's ambivalence for caregivers, and family integrity. Implications for further research involving representations of attachment security in narrative play are discussed.     

Patterns of Nonverbal Behavior and Sensivity in the Context of Attachment Relations

Nonverbal behavior and sensitivity to a relationship partner’s nonverbal behavior importantly influence the quality of interpersonal interactions and relationships, including attachment relationships. The abilities to encode, or express, and to decode, or understand, nonverbal cues are crucial to effective communication of emotions and are associated with social adjustment and relationship satisfaction. One important social context for the development and use of nonverbal encodingand decoding abilities is what Bowlby (1969/1982, Attachment and loss: Vol.1.Attachment (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books) called attachment relationships—interpersonal relationships in which one person’s emotional security depends on another person’s sensitive, responsive caregiving and support. In this paper, we present theoretical ideas, review relevant research, and propose new avenues of research dealing with associations between attachment-related processes and patterns of nonverbal behavior and sensitivity in adulthood, two domains of research that have not previously been adequately connected.     

Marital Satisfaction,Family Emotional Expressiveness,Home Learning Environments,and Children's Emergent Literacy

The current study investigates associations among marital satisfaction, family emotional expressiveness, the home learning environment, and preschool‐aged children's emergent literacy skills among 385 Midwestern mothers and their children. Path analyses examined how marital satisfaction related to emotional expressiveness in the home and whether this path was associated with the home learning environment and children's literacy skills. Higher maternal satisfaction was associated with higher levels of positive and lower levels of negative family emotional expressiveness. Additionally, family emotional environments characterized by mothers with higher positive expression were related to better home learning environments, which in turn were associated with higher literacy skills in children. Study findings underscore the importance of marital and family processes when considering young children's academic development.     

The early home environment and developmental outcomes for young children in the child welfare system

The quality of the early home environment is predictive of young children's subsequent cognitive, academic, and behavioral functioning. Limited research has focused on the effects of the early caregiving environment on the functioning of young children involved with the child welfare system. This study investigated the influence of children's home environments (i.e., number of children in the home, number of moves the child experienced, level of cognitive stimulation, and level of emotional support) during the first 2 years of life on their preschool developmental outcomes (i.e., cognition, language, social skills, and behavior problems).As anticipated, a high-quality early home environment promoted the well-being of preschool children who had entered the child welfare system as infants. Children who lived with greater numbers of children incurred more compromised cognitive, language, behavioral, and social outcomes. No significant associations emerged between the total number of placements and developmental outcomes; children who remained in the same home during infancy (typically the birth family home) had more compromised developmental outcomes in every domain except behavioral problems.Both cognitive stimulation and emotional support in the home predicted higher cognitive and language scores, decreased behavioral problems, and increased social skills. Early out-of-home placement and lack of emotional support interacted to predict children's behavioral problems. These findings are considered in the context of extant research and policy relevant to young children in the child welfare system.     

Classroom learning environments and the mental health of first grade children

Sociological research focuses on how poverty, family, and neighborhood dynamics shape children's problems, but knowledge about how school is related to children's mental health is underdeveloped, despite its central presence in children's lives. Using a social structure and personality-stress contagion perspective, the authors use a nationally representative sample of first graders (N = 10,700) to assess how the classroom learning environment affects children's emotional and behavior problems. Children in more negative environments-such as classrooms with fewer material resources and whose teachers receive less respect from colleagues-have more learning, externalizing, interpersonal, and internalizing problems. Moreover, children in classrooms with low academic standards, excessive administrative paperwork, rowdy behavior, and low skill level of peers have more problems across one or more outcomes. Some school effects vary across race and ethnicity.     

Sensitivity to Social Contingency and Positive Emotion in 2‐Month‐Olds

This study was aimed at sorting out conflicting results in the literature concerning 2‐month‐olds' sensitivity to interpersonal contingency, and investigated the potential role of infants' positive emotion in contingency detection. Infants were randomly assigned to an experimental group (EG) that was presented an uninterrupted live–replay–live sequence of three 30‐sec episodes of their mothers' communicative behavior using a double video TV paradigm, or to a control group (CG) that was presented an uninterrupted 90 sec of contingent maternal interactions. Infants of the EG grimaced more than infants of the CG only during the 2nd period of social exchange (replay vs. 2nd live period), but there was an increase of grimacing and a reduction in gazing during the 3rd period of televised interactions in infants of the CG. Each group was split into 2 subgroups a posteriori according to the presence or absence of smiling during the 1st contingent episode. Smiling infants of the EG reacted more negatively during the 2nd interaction period compared to other subgroups. These findings support the view that sensitivity, not fatigue or loss of interest to maternal stimulation, accounts for 2‐month‐olds' expressive changes during noncontingent maternal interactions; fatigue or loss of interest better explains the decline in attention and the increase of negative expressiveness during the last period of contingent interaction. The findings also suggest that the emotional climate of dyadic exchanges could be a contributing factor to infants' ability to detect the relations between their own actions and those of their social partners.     

Sex differences in nonverbal expressiveness: Emotional expression,personality, and impressions

Sex differences in expressiveness are well documented, but the reasons for and correlates of these important differences are not well studied. A comprehensive set of emotion-relevant personality measures was administered to 40 female and 39 male undergraduate participants, who were also videotaped in three situations: engaging in natural social interaction, describing a past emotional experience, and posing various emotions. Videotapes were judged by sets of naive observers as to emotion communicated and overall impression. Expressive females, who appeared friendly and dominant in social interaction, were found to have a hostile/aggressive personality (but this was not true of males). Expressive females also tended to look angry/disgusted when describing happy and sad experiences. The findings suggest that nonverbally skilled, charismatic women (but not men) may often possess a dominant/aggressive but self-controlled personality, in a new twist on the theory that sex differences in expressiveness result in part from the oppression of women in society.This research was supported in part by an intramural research grant from University of California, Riverside.     

The Role of Socialization,Effortful Control,and Ego Resiliency in French Adolescents' Social Functioning

The relations among effortful control, ego resiliency, socialization, and social functioning were examined with a sample of 182 French adolescents (14–20 years old). Adolescents, their parents, and/or teachers completed questionnaires on these constructs. Effortful control and ego resiliency were correlated with adolescents' social functioning, especially with low externalizing and internalizing behaviors and sometimes with high peer competence. Furthermore, aspects of socialization (parenting practices more than family expressiveness) were associated with adolescents' effortful control, ego resiliency, and social functioning. Effortful control and ego resiliency mediated the relations between parental socialization and adolescents' peer competence and internalizing problems. Furthermore, effortful control mediated the relations between socialization and adolescents' externalizing behavior. Findings are discussed in terms of cultural and developmental variation.     

Design of a language stimulation program for children suffering abuse

This article proposes an intervention program, designed specifically for children in residential care who suffer institutionalized abuse, aimed at stimulating their use of language. The objective of the intervention procedure is to improve children's linguistic competence and their socio-affective development, as well as to enable parents to communicate and interact effectively with their children. Several studies have focused on the difficulties children suffering from abuse have with verbal expression and other areas of development. The research stresses the need to set up intervention programs that can improve the linguistic and social competence of children suffering from abuse. With such children, there is a fundamental need to develop a competence that will encourage their adaptive social skills, which are basic skills for interacting socially and which encourage the pragmatic language function, a skill needed for relating to adults and solving interpersonal problems.     

The Influence of Facial Emotion Displays, Gender, and Ethnicity on Judgments of Dominance and Affiliation

Facial expressions of emotions convey not only information about emotional states but also about interpersonal intentions. The present study investigated whether factors known to influence the decoding of emotional expressions—the gender and ethnicity of the stimulus person as well as the intensity of the expression—would also influence attributions of interpersonal intentions. For this, 145 men and women rated emotional facial expressions posed by both Caucasian and Japanese male and female stimulus persons on perceived dominance and affiliation. The results showed that the sex and the ethnicity of the encoder influenced observers' ratings of dominance and affiliation. For anger displays only, this influence was mediated by expectations regarding how likely it is that a particular encoder group would display anger. Further, affiliation ratings were equally influenced by low intensity and by high intensity expressions, whereas only fairly intense emotional expressions affected attributions of dominance.     

Children's understanding of the interpersonal consequences of dissemblance of nonverbal emotional-expressive behavior

Eighty-five children in three age groups (6–7, 10–11, and 13–14 years) participated in an interview study in which their beliefs were elicited about how others are likely to react when one presents an emotional front. They also responded to questions about (a) their preference for adults versus peers as targets of genuine emotional expressiveness, (b) expected outcomes for children who either almost never reveal their feelings or who almost always do, and (c) how they construct a balance for themselves between when to reveal their real feelings and when not to. Age and sex differences were found for some social contexts and not for others. The oldest girls stood out on a number of comparisons as a unique group: They were more likely to believe that dissembled expressions would be taken at face value in a couple of social contexts, they were more likely to prefer peers as the recipients of genuine emotional-expressive displays, and they gave more complex reasoning about how to achieve a balance between dissemblance and expression of genuine feelings. The data are discussed from the standpoint of how naive theories of emotion are used by children to make sense of their social relations.I would like to express my appreciation to the children and staff of Rohnert Park School District for participating in this investigation. I also want to thank Jane Weiskopf for her help in interviewing the children and Michael Crowley for his undertaking of the statistical analyses.     

Magnification of affect using frame-by-frame film analysis

Frame-by-frame film analysis of social interaction enhances the observer's ability to make inferences about the affective component of the interaction by allowing a detailed and precise review of the interpersonal behavior. An example of leave-taking behavior between a parent and preschool child is presented. The magnification of the interaction by repeated slow-motion viewing allows one to draw out emotional behavioral components that occur too rapidly to be perceived at normal speed. The technique is applicable to any type of interpersonal analysis.     

Heterogeneity of Joy in Infancy

We examined 7‐month‐old infants' responses to 6 joy‐eliciting episodes. Three episodes included and 3 did not include a major social‐interactive component. Confirmatory factor analysis of infants' joy reactions in these episodes revealed that a 2‐factor model significantly improved the fit over a single‐factor solution. Those 2 factors represented infants' social versus nonsocial joy reactions. Different correlates of those factors supported their external validity. Only social joy was associated with the infants' positive emotional tone observed during naturalistic interactions with their mothers and fathers, and with the parents' ratings of the child's positive affect during social interactions in their daily lives. Social joy may be an early antecedent of future positive emotionality traits related to communal and interpersonal aspects of experience.     

How Sentiments Organize Social Action

Sociological studies of affect and associated processes have a long tradition in the discipline, originating with Durkheim's interest in religious belief and practice. Contemporary interest in the area has focused on several distinct instances in which affective evaluations are learned, are expressed toward others, organize behavior in social situations, and change. Attitudes, emotions , feelings, moods, and sentiments are distinguished from one another and studied as distinct factors in the organization of social action. Affective information is socialized in families and reinforced in social institutions as the actor matures. Interaction with others and the exchange of social rewards leads to patterns of social organization in proximal and distal groups as actors identify others who share similar patterns of orientation to social objects. Status structures in groups are reflected in patterns of sentiment distribution. Similarly, sentiment and emotion structures impact status behavior in groups. Technological developments have advanced measurement of emotional reactions, expression of sentiments toward social objects, and identification of social structures in social media. Theoretical developments in the study of sentiment and emotion are highlighted in the essay.     

Maternal Reminiscing Style and Children’s Developing Understanding of Self and Emotion

Individual differences in how mothers structure reminiscing about shared past experiences with their preschool children are related to children’s developing autobiographical memory skills and understanding of self and emotion. More specifically, mothers who engage in highly elaborative reminiscing have children who come to tell more coherent and emotionally expressive autobiographical narratives, and these children also show better understanding of self and are better able to regulate emotion than children of less elaborative mothers. This body of research is reviewed and relations between maternal reminiscing style and children’s developing self and emotional understanding are explicated. This paper was written while the first author was a senior fellow in the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University, sponsored by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Pew Charitable trusts.     

Children's reliance on situational and vocal expression of emotions: Consistent and conflicting cues

The aim of the present study was to investigate developmental differences in reliance on situational versus vocal cues for recognition of emotions. Turkish preschool, second, and fifth grade children participated in the study. Children listened to audiotape recordings of situations between a mother and a child where the emotional cues implied by the context of a vignette and the vocal expression were either consistent or inconsistent. After listening to each vignette, participants were questioned about the content of the incident and were asked to make a judgment about the emotion of the mother referred to in the recording. Angry, happy, and neutral emotions were utilized. Results revealed that 1) recognition of emotions improved with age, and 2) children relied more on the channel depicting either anger or happiness than on the channel depicting neutrality.