Gender-Differentiated Emotion Socialization: Evoked by Child Behaviors, Parents’ Neural Responses Toward Gender-Stereotype Violations, or Both?

Abstract

SYNOPSIS Objective. During early childhood, gender-specific trajectories of behavior and emotional development become more prominent. However, it remains unclear whether parents’ gender-differentiated socialization is evoked by children’s own behaviors and emotions, processes within parents, or both. This study examined whether parents’ gender labeling of emotional characters could be predicted by (1) their children’s behavior and emotional expressions, (2) parents’ neural responses to gender-stereotype violations and confirmations by their own children, or (3) both. Design. Home visits were conducted with 71 families consisting of a father, mother, and a daughter and son aged 3–6 years. Electroencephalographic measurements were obtained from parents while they passively viewed pictures of their daughter and son combined with gender-typed behavior and emotional expression words. Mothers’ and fathers’ use of gender labels was coded while they read a picture book to their daughter and son in which gender-neutral child characters displayed sadness, fear, and anger. Children’s gender-typed behavior and emotional expressions were measured through parent-reports on the Brief Symptom Checklist. Results. No relations were found between parents’ use of gender labels and parents’ neural processing of gender-stereotype confirmations and violations or children’s behavior and emotional expressions. Conclusions. Parents’ neural processing and children’s emotion and behavioral expressions did not affect parents’ use of gender labels. Parents were more likely to label pictures of sad children as “girl” than as “boy,” but this difference could not be predicted from either parent-centered or child-centered factors.