The Relations Between Mother’s Ambivalence over Emotional Expressiveness and Children's Strategies of Emotion Regulation and Social Competence

Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine the relation between mother’s ambivalence over emotional expressiveness and children’s strategies emotion regulation and social competence. The subject of the study was 360 children in 4, 5, 6 years old, their mothers and teachers of two kindergartens in Dal-seogu in Daegu. AEQ(King & Emmons, 1990) was used for mother's ambivalence over emotional expressiveness. The combination of ECR(Shiels & Cicchetti, 1995) was used for children’s strategies of emotion regulation and SCBE(La Freniere & Dumas, 1995) was used for social competence. For the analysis of data Pearson’s Correlation coefficient was applied.<BR> The Results were following: First, the study showed that there was a relation between mother’s ambivalence over emotional expressiveness and children’s strategies of emotion regulation. Both mother’s ambivalence over emotional expressiveness and ambivalence over negative emotional competence had negative correlation and had positive correlation with maladjusted strategies of emotion regulation. Secondly, it was showed that mother’s ambivalence over emotional expressiveness had relation with children’s social competence. Mother’s ambivalence over positive and negative emotional expressiveness had negative correlation with calmness, sociality, cooperation, self-control held in a subordinate position and had no correlation with integration. Thus, we can recognize that not only children’s age and gender but also mother’s ambivalence over emotional expressiveness was an important variable in children’s strategies of emotion regulation and social competence.