Mothers' Regulation Strategies in Response to Toddlers' Affect: Links to Later Emotion Self-Regulation

Recently, there has been a great deal of research on the socialization of children's emotions and self‐regulation. In the present study, the specific strategies that mothers use to help their young children regulate their emotional responses were examined using a longitudinal design. Forty‐three mother–toddler pairs were observed when toddlers were both 18 and 30 months of age, and mothers’ attempts to regulate their toddlers’ emotions during several emotion‐eliciting tasks were transcribed from videotape. When the children were 5 years old, their responses to a disappointment task were observed. Results indicated a relation between mothers’ regulation strategies in toddlerhood and children's facial and behavioral responses to the disappointment task measured at 5 years of age. Specifically, mothers’ use of regulation strategies at 30 months, but not at 18 months, was positively related to children's appropriate emotional displays in response to disappointment. Moreover, the specific types of strategies that mothers used had differential associations to children's responses to disappointment. Findings are discussed in terms of the potentially important role of mothers’ behaviors in the development of children's emotion self‐regulation.     

Children's Self-esteem and Moral Self: Links to Parent–Child Conversations Regarding Emotion

The current study has two aims: (1) to examine associations between the emotional content of parent–child past event conversations and two aspects of children's self‐concept—moral self and self‐esteem; and (2) to examine the degree to which talk about past events is uniquely associated with self‐concept when compared with talk about ongoing events and situations. Fifty‐one five‐ and six‐year‐old New Zealand children and their parents discussed four emotional past events and two ongoing conflicts. Children's moral self, self‐esteem and language ability were also assessed. When parents referred to a greater number of positive emotions and evaluations, regardless of conversation type, their children had higher self‐esteem. Past event talk also uniquely predicted children's self‐esteem: Parents who used more explanations during conversations regarding past negative emotions, and more explanations and confirmations of past positive emotions, had children with higher self‐esteem. We discuss these results with respect to an autobiographical memory approach to self‐concept development.     

European‐American and African‐American Mothers' Emotion Socialization Practices Relate Differently to Their Children's Academic and Social‐emotional Competence

The current study examines whether the relation between mothers' responses to their children's negative emotions and teachers' reports of children's academic performance and social‐emotional competence are similar or different for European‐American and African‐American families. Two hundred mothers (137 European‐American, 63 African‐American) reported on their responses to their five‐year‐old children's negative emotions and 150 kindergarten teachers reported on these children's current academic standing and skillfulness with peers. Problem‐focused responses to children's negative emotions, which have traditionally been considered a supportive response, were positively associated with children's school competence for European‐American children, but expressive encouragement, another response considered supportive, was negatively associated with children's competence for African‐American children. The findings highlight the need to examine parental socialization practices from a culturally specific lens.     

Mothers' and Fathers' Emotion Socialization and Children's Emotion Regulation: A Within‐Family Model

In the current study, we examined whether mothers' and fathers' reactions to young children's positive and negative emotions were associated with children's negativity and emotion regulation. We utilized a within‐family design with 70 families (mother, father, and two siblings between the ages of 2 and 5 years). Mothers and fathers completed questionnaires about their emotion socialization as well as children's negativity and emotion regulation. Results indicated that mothers' and fathers' unsupportive reactions to children's positive emotions were associated with children's negativity. Fathers' unsupportive reactions to children's emotional displays were differentially associated with older and younger siblings' emotion regulation. Fathers' unsupportive responses to children's positive and negative emotions also contributed jointly to children's emotion regulation. The results suggest that exploring the within‐family correlates of children's emotion regulation and negativity is useful for understanding children's emotional development.     

Maternal Emotion-related Socialization and Preschoolers' Developing Emotion Self-awareness

Preschoolers' ability to demonstrate awareness of their own emotion is an important socio‐emotional competence which has received increasing attention in the developmental literature. The present study examined emotion self‐awareness of happiness, sadness, and anger in response to a delay of gratification task in 78 preschool children. Maternal emotion‐related socialization behaviors (ERSBs) including reported emotional expressivity, responses to her child's emotions, and observed emotion talk, were examined as predictors of children's emotion self‐awareness skill one year later. Results show that, after controlling for receptive language ability, supportive ERSBs were predictive of high self‐awareness of happiness whereas non‐supportive ERSBs were predictive of low self‐awareness of sadness. The results demonstrate that the concordance between observed and self‐reported emotion serves as a useful index of children's awareness of their emotional experience.     

Mothers' Socialization of Children's Emotion in India and the USA: A Cross‐ and Within‐culture Comparison

Parent responses to children's emotions vary within and across cultures. The present study compared mothers' reports of their emotional and behavioral responses in hypothetical situations depicting their children experiencing anger, sadness, or physical pain in two communities in India (traditional old city, N = 60; suburban middle class, N = 60), with a suburban middle‐class group in the USA (N = 60). Results showed that mothers in both groups in India reported more explanation‐oriented problem‐focused responses to their children's emotions than US mothers. US mothers reported the most solution‐oriented problem‐focused responses, followed by suburban Indian mothers, followed by old‐city mothers. US mothers reported behaviorally‐oriented punitive responses (i.e., time out, removal of privileges) towards child anger more than the other groups. Suburban Indian mothers reported briefly not talking to the child in response to child anger more than the other groups whereas old‐city Indian mothers reported scolding/spanking more than the other groups.     

Vagal modulation of 1‐month‐old infants to auditory stimuli is associated with self‐regulatory behavior

During infancy, cardiac vagal modulation has been associated with attentional and social engagement behaviors. While studies have shown that infants display a behavioral repertoire that enables them to interact with others by being able to regulate themselves in order to attend to and to discriminate emotional and social cues, vagal modulation to sensory stimuli and its association with behavioral outcomes at early ages remains to be addressed. In this study, we analyzed the cardiac vagal response of 1‐month‐old infants to two auditory stimuli intensities and whether vagal response was associated with social interactive and self‐regulatory abilities. Therefore, we recorded cardiac and respiratory physiological responses in 28 infants using a Biopac System. Neurobehavioral assessment was performed using the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale. We observed increased respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) amplitude to both auditory stimuli intensities when compared to baseline. No intensity effect was found for the RSA response. Additionally, we observed that higher RSA amplitude to both auditory stimuli was positively correlated with adjusted self‐regulatory behaviors, suggesting a convergence between multiple measures assessing infants' state regulation. Results are discussed in light of 1‐month‐old infants' auditory stimuli processing and its implications for regulatory behaviors and the emergent social‐like behaviors.     

Parent emotion socialization and children's socioemotional adjustment: when is supportiveness no longer supportive?

Parents' supportive emotion socialization behaviors promote children's socioemotional competence in early childhood, but the nature of parents' supportiveness may change over time, as children continue to develop their emotion‐related abilities and enter contexts that require more complex and nuanced social skills and greater autonomy. To test whether associations between parents' supportiveness of children's negative emotions and children's socioemotional adjustment vary with child age, 81 parents of 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children completed questionnaires assessing their responses to children's negative emotions and their children's emotion regulation, lability, social competence, and behavioral adjustment. As predicted, child age moderated the associations between parents' supportiveness and children's socioemotional adjustment. For younger children, parents' supportiveness predicted better emotion regulation and less anxiety/internalizing and anger/externalizing problems. However, for older children, these associations were reversed, suggesting that socialization strategies which were supportive for younger children may fail to foster socioemotional competence among 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children. These results suggest the importance of considering emotion socialization as a dynamic, developmental process, and that parents' socialization of children's emotions might need to change in response to children's developing emotional competencies and social demands.     

Family meta‐emotion and the onset of major depressive disorder in adolescence: A prospective longitudinal study

Meta‐emotion philosophy refers to an organized set of thoughts, reactions, and feelings about one's emotions and the emotions of others (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1997). This study investigated the prospective relationship between family meta‐emotion processes and adolescent‐onset major depressive disorder (MDD). Adolescents (N = 198, mean age 12.5 years) and one of their parents each completed the Meta‐Emotion Interview (Katz & Gottman, 1986), and adolescents were followed‐up at ages 15, 16.5, and 19 years to assess for MDD onset. In the Meta‐Emotion Interviews, parents and adolescents were asked about both their own, and the others', anger and sadness. Results showed that parent‐report of their own meta‐emotion philosophy of sadness prospectively predicted MDD onset in adolescence, as did adolescent‐report of low parental emotion coaching in relation to sadness, and adolescent self‐perceived emotional competence in relation to sadness. Adolescents' perceptions of family emotional environments characterized by high levels of parental anger expression and family conflict also prospectively predicted MDD onset. These findings highlight the continued importance of family emotional processes in adolescence, and provide insight into how parents' and adolescents' perceptions of emotional processes within the family, particularly in relation to sadness, may be prospectively associated with risk for adolescent onset MDD.     

Parasympathetic Regulation and Parental Socialization of Emotion: Biopsychosocial Processes of Adjustment in Preschoolers

Variations in parents' emotion socialization have been linked to children's social competence (SC) and behavior problems, but parental influences do not act independently of children's characteristics. A biopsychosocial model was tested, in which children's parasympathetic regulation of cardiac function and paternal and maternal socialization of negative emotions were examined as joint predictors of young children's SC and behavior problems at daycare and preschool. Mothers and fathers responded differently to children's emotions, and cardiac vagal tone moderated the relations between parents' emotion socialization and children's behavior in early childcare settings. Both maternal and paternal emotion socialization strategies were more strongly associated with preschool adjustment for children with relatively less parasympathetic self‐regulatory capacities than for more self‐regulated children. Paternal reactions to children's anger, and maternal responses to children's sadness and fear, were particularly closely tied to variations in SC and internalizing and externalizing problems.     

Parental Emotion Socialization in Adolescence: Differences in Sex, Age and Problem Status

There is a paucity of research on how mothers and fathers socialize emotion in their adolescent sons and daughters. This study was based on 220 adolescents (range 11‐ to 16‐years‐old) who exhibit a range of emotional and behavioral problems and their parents. Parental responses to their children's displays of sadness, anger and fear were assessed. Mothers were found to be more engaged in their children's emotional lives than were fathers. With a few important exceptions (e.g., boys were punished for expressions of anger more than girls), adolescent girls and boys were socialized in much the same way. Parents of older adolescents were generally less supportive and more punitive toward emotional displays. Systematic links between adolescent problem status and parent approaches to emotion socialization were found. These findings on how parents socialize emotions in their adolescents have important implications for theory as well as practice.     

Peer Nominations of Emotional Expressivity Among Urban Children: Social and Psychological Correlates

The current study examined associations between peer nominations of children's expression of negative emotions and psychological, social, and behavioral correlates in a sample of 523 first graders. Children (85 percent African‐American) completed a peer nomination measure for expressing negative emotions. In addition, three other domains of functioning were assessed using multiple raters: internalizing symptoms (self, parent), externalizing behavior (parent, teacher), and social competence (parent, teacher). Regression analyses indicated that peer nominations of negative emotions predicted higher levels of teacher‐rated externalizing behavior and lower levels of teacher‐rated social competence. Peer nominations of emotions were significantly associated with teacher ratings but unrelated to self‐ and parent‐report measures. Adding to a small but growing literature, our findings underscore the importance of assessing peer perceptions of children's emotional expressivity and their associations to social and psychological functioning in an urban, predominantly African‐American sample.     

Parental communication about emotional contexts: Differences across discrete categories of emotion

Parent socialization of emotion is critical for children's emotional development. One mechanism through which parents socialize emotional understanding is in their conversations about emotions with their children. Previous research has investigated parent–child discourse about emotions differing by positive and negative valence. This study examined how parents communicated about and differentially emphasized elements of discrete emotion contexts (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, joy). Caregivers described images of emotional contexts to their 18‐month‐old or 24‐month‐old infant. Findings indicated that parents talked more about sadness images than joy images. Furthermore, parents mentioned the emoter more in anger and sadness contexts and talked about the referent more in disgust, fear, and joy contexts. Parents also posed more questions to female than male infants, particularly when discussing anger, sadness, and disgust images. No age differences were observed for any measure. These findings provide new insight into how parents talk about and highlight aspects of discrete emotional contexts.     

The Nature and Effects of Young Children's Lies

Children's use of deception in a naturalistic setting was observed longitudinally in 40 families when children were 2 and 4 years old, and again two years later. Goals included describing children's lying behavior and parents’ reactions to lies, and comparing lies to other false statements. Lies were commonly told to avoid responsibility for transgressions, to falsely accuse siblings, and to gain control over another's behavior. Unlike children's other false statements (e.g., mistakes, pretense), lies were distinctly self‐serving. Parents rarely addressed the act of lying itself but often challenged the veracity of lies or addressed the underlying transgression. Older siblings lied more often than younger ones, and parents who allowed older siblings to lie at Time 1 had children who lied more often at Time 2. Results are considered from a speech‐act perspective and in terms of children's developing understanding of mental states.     

The Impact of Developing Social Perspective‐taking Skills on Emotionality in Middle and Late Childhood

A sample of 209 children was followed longitudinally to examine the impact of growing perspective‐taking skills on positive and negative emotionality in middle and late childhood. Perspective‐taking skills were assessed through interviews. Teachers rated children's emotional reactivity and capacity to regain a neutral state following emotional arousal. Analyses of contemporaneous data revealed that more developed perspective‐taking skills were associated with moderate levels of emotional reactivity. In addition, in children with high emotional reactivity, good perspective‐taking skills were associated with good capacity to regain a neutral affective state following emotional arousal. Longitudinal analyses revealed that children who made gains in perspective‐taking skills over a two‐year‐period became more moderate in negative emotional reactivity and improved their ability to down‐regulate strong positive emotions. The overall findings support the notion that children use perspective‐taking skills as a tool for optimal regulation of emotional responses.     

Navigating the Transition to Junior High School: The Influence of Pre-Transition Friendship and Self-System Characteristics

The present study examined the influence of pre‐transition friendship and self‐system characteristics on junior high school transition adjustment in a sample of 111 early adolescent girls and boys. Transition adjustment was defined in terms of youth's post‐transition friendship quality, emotional distress, and school adjustment. Pre‐transition friendship characteristics were directly linked with both post‐transition friendship quality and school adjustment, while youth's expected possible selves, a component of youth's self‐system, made additional unique contributions to the prediction of youth's emotional distress and school adjustment. Results suggest the importance of developmentally salient friendship and self‐system characteristics in contributing to individual variability in transition adaptation.     

Peer Victimization: The Role of Emotions in Adaptive and Maladaptive Coping

Mediator models were examined in which children's emotional reactions to peer aggression were hypothesized to mediate their selection of coping strategies and subsequent peer victimization and internalizing problems. Self‐report data were collected from 145 ethnically diverse kindergarten through fifth grade children (66 females and 79 males) who attended a predominantly low‐ to middle‐class school. Hypothetical scenarios were used to assess children's anticipated responses to peer aggression. Victims reported more intense negative emotions (e.g., fear and anger) than did nonvictims. Fear emerged as a predictor of advice seeking which, in turn, predicted conflict resolution and fewer internalizing problems. Conflict resolution was associated with reductions in victimization. Anger and embarrassment predicted revenge seeking which, in turn, was associated with increases in victimization. Additional pathways predicting changes in peer victimization across a single academic year as a function of children's emotional and coping responses to peer abuse are discussed.     

Young Children's Psychological Selves: Convergence with Maternal Reports of Child Personality

The present research examined five‐year‐old children's psychological self‐concepts. Non‐linear factor analysis was used to model the latent structure of the children's self‐view questionnaire (CSVQ; Eder, 1990 ), a measure of children's self‐concepts. The coherence and reliability of the emerging factor structure indicated that young children are capable of meaningfully reporting about their own emotions and personalities. Moreover, these self‐reports from five‐year‐olds converged with maternal perceptions of child personality. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the study of emergent personality, continuity/discontinuity in personality assessment across the lifespan, and self‐concept formation in early childhood.     

The Role of Child Emotional Responsiveness and Maternal Negative Emotion Expression in Children's Coping Strategy Use

This study examined the additive and interactive effects of children's trait vicarious emotional responsiveness and maternal negative emotion expression on children's use of coping strategies. Ninety‐five children (mean age = 5.87 years) and their mothers and teachers participated in the study. The mothers reported on their own negative emotion expression and the children's empathic concern and personal distress tendencies. The mothers and teachers reported on the children's use of avoidant, support‐seeking, and aggressive‐venting coping strategies. Empathic concern was positively associated with the children's use of support seeking and negatively associated with the children's use of aggressive venting, whereas personal distress showed the opposite pattern of associations. Maternal negative emotion expression moderated some associations between the children's emotional responsiveness and coping. These findings support the hypothesis that children's tendencies to experience empathic concern or personal distress indicate functionally distinct styles of emotional arousal that may have broader consequences for socially competent behavior in response to normative stressors.     

The home visit in child protection social work: Emotion as resource and risk for professional judgement and practice

This article conceptualises the role of emotion in social work home visits. It draws on findings from a qualitative study of initial child protection home visits in the United Kingdom. The research used narrative interviews and focus groups to examine how emotions arising from visits were registered in social workers' narratives. These visits were often challenging; social workers needed to manage their own emotions and those of the family, while at the same time investigating concerns and assessing need. This article identifies seven key emotional experiences associated with the home visit from the perspective of the social worker: going into the unknown; being intrusive; being disliked; fear of harm to self; fear of causing or allowing harm; pain, disgust, and distress; and “absorbing” emotion. It is argued that emotion plays a central role in home visiting and that professionals' emotional responses have important implications for the way they make sense of, and manage, home visits. Emotion is therefore conceptualized as both a potential resource and risk for social workers' professional judgement and practice.