Emotion understanding of Turkish preschoolers and maternal emotional socialization

Abstract

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship between emotion understanding and maternal emotional socialization responses to children's negative emotions. Emotion understanding was also investigated according to children's age and gender. The participants included 210 Turkish children and their mothers living in Ankara, Turkey. All children were recruited from kindergartens and all of them were between 48-72 month-olds. To gather data, Affect Knowledge Test (AKT) and Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale were used. Confirmayory Factor Analysis was performed for construct validity for AKT. Pearson correlation coefficients, ANOVA and posthoc tests were conducted. In this study, no relations were established between emotion understanding and the maternal emotional responses to children's negative emotions. It also has been revealed that 72 month-olds had better emotion understanding skills and emotion understanding did not change according to children's gender. It may be useful to include other important predictors of children’s social and emotional competence and paternal responses for future studies.