Spanish parents' emotion talk and their children's understanding of emotion

Ana Aznar,Harriet R Tenenbaum

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00670

Ana Aznar, Harriet R Tenenbaum

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00670

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Abstract

Relations between parent-child emotion talk and children's emotion understanding were examined in 63 Spanish mothers and fathers and their 4- (M = 53.35 months, SD = 3.86) and 6-year-old (M = 76.62 months, SD = 3.91) children. Parent-child emotion talk was analyzed during two storytelling tasks: a play-related storytelling task and a reminiscence task (conversation about past experiences). Children's emotion understanding was assessed twice through a standardized test of emotion comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004), once before one of the two parent-child storytelling sessions and again 6 months later. Mothers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task predicted children's emotion understanding after controlling for children's previous emotion understanding. Whereas fathers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task was correlated with children's emotion understanding, it did not predict children's emotion understanding after controlling for previous emotion understanding. Implications of these findings for future research on children's socioemotional development are discussed.

Highlights

SPANISH PARENT-CHILD EMOTION TALK AND CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF EMOTIONS Emotion understanding is the ability to recognize, label, interpret, and respond to our own and others’ emotions
The present study focused on mothers’ and fathers’ use of emotion labels and explanations across two different storytelling tasks
THE PRESENT STUDY The present study focused on 4- and 6-year-old children because most research examining parent-child emotion talk and children’s understanding of emotions has analyzed children up to the age of four (Dunn et al, 1991; Wang, 2001; Wellman et al, 2001; Martin and Green, 2005; Denham et al, 2010), leaving little research of children’s emotion understanding after the age of four

Summary

Introduction

SPANISH PARENT-CHILD EMOTION TALK AND CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF EMOTIONS Emotion understanding is the ability to recognize, label, interpret, and respond to our own and others’ emotions. When children are 3 years of age they understand external aspects of emotion such as its situational causes (e.g., different situations provoke individuals to experience different emotions), its outward expression (e.g., individuals tend to express their emotions), and reminders’ effect on affect (e.g., when someone reminds a child about a recently deceased pet, the child might experience sadness again). Children typically master this level of understanding by five. Denham (1997) found that teachers rated children whose parents talked about emotions frequently as cooperative, empathic, and prosocial

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