Emotion Socialization Practices Research Articles

Tuning in to Teens: Improving Parent Emotion Socialization to Reduce Youth Internalizing Difficulties

AbstractResearch in child development suggests that parents' emotional competence and emotion socialization practices are related to children's emotional functioning, including child internalizing difficulties. This research has not yet been translated into intervention or prevention programs targeting parents of older children and adolescents. The current study examined the efficacy of the Tuning in to Teens parenting program in improving emotion socialization practices in parents of preadolescents and reducing youth internalizing difficulties. Schools were randomized into intervention and control conditions. Data were collected from 225 parents and 224 youth during the young person's final year of elementary school (sixth grade) and again 10 months later in their first year of secondary school (seventh grade). Multilevel analyses showed significant improvements in parental emotion socialization and reductions in youth internalizing difficulties for the intervention condition. This study provides support for the efficacy of the TINT parenting program with a community sample.

Links Between Remembered Childhood Emotion Socialization and Adult Adjustment: Similarities and Differences Between European American and African American Women.

The purpose of this paper was to examine whether recollections of mothers' emotion socialization practices during childhood are linked to adult emotional well-being as indexed by depression, trait anger, and cardiac vagal tone, and whether these effects vary for African American and European American women. Participants included 251 women (128 European American; 123 African American) who ranged in age from 18 to 44 years (M = 25 years). Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses indicated strong measurement and factor invariance across African American and European American participants. Remembered non-supportive emotion socialization was linked with elevated depressive symptoms for European American women, but not African American women and with elevated trait anger for both groups. Remembered supportive emotion socialization was linked with higher resting vagal tone for both groups. The results provide some support for the view that non-supportive emotion socialization may be more detrimental for European Americans than African Americans.

The relations of ego-resiliency and emotion socialization to the development of empathy and prosocial behavior across early childhood.

The present study explored early personality and environmental predictors of the development of young children's empathy, as well as relations of empathy to prosocial behavior with peers at a later age. How children manage their own emotions and behaviors when under stress--their ego-resiliency--would be expected to affect their responses to others' emotions. Also, socialization experiences, such as the quality of parenting behaviors, have been associated with individual differences in empathy-related responding. We examined whether mothers' emotion socialization practices and children's ego-resiliency at 18 months predicted initial levels and change in empathy across five time points (24, 30, 42, 48, and 54 months; N = 242), and whether empathy in turn predicted prosocial behavior with peers at 72/84 months of age. Ego-resiliency and mothers' expressive encouragement both uniquely predicted the intercept of empathy. Boys' empathy was lower than girls' but improved more with age. Initial levels and growth of empathy positively predicted later prosocial behavior. Children's ego-resiliency predicted the slope of empathy at near significance (p = .054). We also found that the intercept of empathy mediated the relation between ego-resiliency and prosocial behavior as well as the relation between mothers' expressive encouragement and prosocial behavior. These findings suggest that both parenting and personality characteristics are relevant to the development of empathy during early childhood and might contribute to children's later prosocial behavior with peers.

Relations Among Teachers’ Emotion Socialization Beliefs and Practices and Preschoolers’ Emotional Competence

Research Findings: Utilizing a 3-part model of emotion socialization that included modeling, contingent responding, and teaching, this study examined the associations between 44 teachers’ self-reported and observed emotion socialization practices and 326 preschoolers’ emotion knowledge and observed emotional behavior. Multilevel analyses revealed that the majority of the variance in the children's emotion knowledge scores and observed emotional behavior was predicted by factors within, rather than between, classrooms. Teachers’ use of all 3 emotion socialization techniques did contribute to the prediction of the children's scores; however, the nature of these associations differed by children's age and gender. Practice or Policy: The development of children's emotional competence is a complex, multifaceted process in which many interaction partners play a role. Early childhood teachers act as emotion socialization agents for the children in their care by modeling emotions, responding either supportively or punitively to children's expressions of emotions, and engaging in direct instruction regarding emotional experience. This research may provide a basis for potential future interventions designed to assist teachers in developing their own emotion socialization skills so that they can be more effective emotion socialization agents for the children in their care.

Emotion Socialization Style in Parents of Children with Callous–Unemotional Traits

Children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits manifest a range of deficits in their emotional functioning, and parents play a key role in socializing children's understanding, experience, expression, and regulation of emotions. However, research examining emotion-related parenting in families of children with CU traits is scarce. In two independent studies we examined emotion socialization styles in parents of children high on CU traits. In Study 1, we assessed parents' self-reported beliefs and feelings regarding their own and their child's emotions, in a sample of 111 clinic-referred and community children aged 7-12 years. In Study 2, we directly observed parents' responding to child emotion during an emotional reminiscing task, in a clinic sample of 59 conduct-problem children aged 3-9 years. Taken together, the results were consistent in suggesting that the mothers of children with higher levels of CU traits are more likely to have affective attitudes that are less accepting of emotion (Study 1), and emotion socialization practices that are more dismissing of child emotion (Study 2). Fathers' emotion socialization beliefs and practices were unrelated to levels of CU traits. Our findings provide initial evidence for a relationship between CU traits and parents' emotion socialization style, and have significant implications for the design of novel family-based interventions targeting CU traits and co-occurring conduct problems.

Adolescent Emotion Socialization: A Longitudinal Study of Friends' Responses to Negative Emotions

AbstractAlthough peer influences are thought to be critically important to adolescent development, there is a paucity of research investigating the emotion socialization practices that take place between adolescents. This longitudinal study evaluated close friends' responses to negative emotion using a newly developed assessment tool of peer emotion socialization, you and your friends. Adolescent participants (N = 205) exhibiting a range of internalizing and externalizing problems between 11 and 17 years of age were assessed and re‐evaluated two years later. Participants were asked to rate the frequency with which their friends responded to them by encouraging, distracting, matching, ignoring, overtly victimizing, and/or relationally victimizing their emotions. The results indicated high levels of internal consistency and moderate levels of long‐term stability. Close friends most often responded supportively to the participants' emotional displays, but these responses differed by gender. Also, friends' emotion socialization responses were concurrently and predictively associated with participant problem status. This study contributes to a better understanding of the processes by which adolescents' emotions are socialized by their friends and has important implications for future prevention and intervention efforts.

A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Parent Training and Emotion Socialization Program for Families of Hyperactive Preschool-Aged Children

The present study evaluated the effectiveness of a parent training and emotion socialization program designed specifically for hyperactive preschoolers. Participants were 31 preschool-aged children whose parents were randomly assigned to a parent training (PT) or waitlist (WL) control group. PT parents took part in a 14-week parenting program that involved teaching parenting strategies for managing hyperactive and disruptive behavior as well as emotion socialization strategies for improving children's emotion regulation. Compared to WL mothers, PT mothers reported significantly less child inattention, hyperactivity, oppositional defiance, and emotional lability; were observed using significantly more positive and less negative parenting; and reported significantly less maternal verbosity and unsupportive emotion socialization practices. Results provide some support for the effectiveness of this parenting program for reducing attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and associated problems in preschool-aged children.

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 5-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.

Preservice Teachers’ Emotion-Related Regulation and Cognition: Associations With Teachers’ Responses to Children's Emotions in Early Childhood Classrooms

Research Findings: The present research examines preservice teachers’ (N = 24) self-reported emotion-related regulation and cognition as predictors of their observed responses to young children's positive and negative emotional displays. Correlation and regression analyses revealed that teachers reporting greater reappraisal strategies in regulating their own emotions provided more supportive responses to children's negative emotions and fewer nonsupportive responses to children's positive emotions. In addition, teachers reporting more accepting beliefs about children's emotions exhibited more supportive responses to children's negative emotions, but only when they also reported high levels of reappraisal. Lastly, teachers reporting higher levels of perspective taking exhibited more supportive and fewer nonsupportive responses to children's negative emotions. Of note is that perspective taking was associated with greater support of negative emotions only when teachers also reported low or moderate levels of suppression in regulating their own emotions. Practice or Policy: The results suggest the importance of considering teachers’ emotion-related regulation and cognition when planning professional development to enhance emotion socialization practices. The role of laboratory preschools in preservice teacher education and the dissemination of knowledge of effective social-emotional classroom practices is discussed.

Tuning in to Kids: An effectiveness trial of a parenting program targeting emotion socialization of preschoolers.

This article reports on an effectiveness trial of the Tuning in to Kids (TIK) parenting program. TIK aims to improve emotion socialization practices in parents of preschool children; it is a universal prevention program that teaches parents the skills of emotion coaching and also targets parents' own emotion awareness and regulation. The present study followed a 2 × 2 (Treatment Condition × Time) design. One hundred twenty-eight parents of children ages 4.0-5.11 years were recruited from preschools and randomized into intervention and waitlist conditions. Parents in the intervention condition (n = 62) attended a six-session group parenting program delivered by community practitioners who followed intervention fidelity protocols. Parents and preschool teachers completed questionnaires twice during the preschool year: at preintervention and at follow-up (approximately 7 months later). Parents reported on their emotion socialization beliefs and practices, other parenting practices, and on child behavior. Teachers reported on child behavior (Social Competence and Anger-Aggression). Data were analyzed using multilevel modeling. At follow-up, compared to the control group, intervention parents were significantly less emotionally dismissive in their beliefs, less dismissive and more coaching in their practices in response to children's negative emotions, and more positively involved. Although there were improvements in both conditions over time for parent-reported child behavior and teacher-reported social competence, compared to the waitlist group, intervention parents reported a significantly greater reduction in number of behavior problems. This trial demonstrates the potential for community agencies and practitioners in real-world settings to deliver a new parenting program that targets emotional communication in parent-child relationships.

African American and European American Mothers' Beliefs About Negative Emotions and Emotion Socialization Practices

Objective . The authors examined mothers’ beliefs about their children's negative emotions and their emotion socialization practices. Design . A total of 65 African American and 137 European American mothers of 5-year-old children reported their beliefs and typical responses to children's negative emotions, and mothers’ emotion teaching practices were observed. Results . African American mothers reported that the display of negative emotions was less acceptable than European American mothers, and African American mothers of boys perceived the most negative social consequences for the display of negative emotions. African American mothers reported fewer supportive responses to children's negative emotions than did European Americans and more nonsupportive responses to children's anger. African American mothers of boys also reported more nonsupportive responses to submissive negative emotions than did African American mothers of girls. However, no differences were found by ethnicity or child gender in observed teaching about emotions. Group differences in mothers’ responses to negative emotions were explained, in part, by mothers’ beliefs about emotions. Conclusions . Differences in beliefs and practices may reflect African American mothers’ efforts to protect their children from discrimination.

Emotion Socialization and Attachment in Russian Children's Homes

This article examines trends in emotion socialization in Russian children's homes ( detdoma) between 1996 and 2002, with a focus on attachment socialization. It examines the shift between different emotion socialization practices such as ‘toughening attachment’ (purposively non-responsive childcare in institutions) and ‘trading children for childhood’ (the framing of inter-country adoption as the exchange of Russian children to Western adoptive parents for the children's chance at economic success and emotional development). It argues that two central features shaped detdoma workers' attachment socialization of children in the 1990s: the perceived need to 1) socialize children's attachment in an attempt to establish economic and emotional security for children in uncertain times after the fall of the Soviet Union; and 2) shape children's understandings of attachment within transnational contexts as child migration to the West increased over the course of the decade. Investigating attachment socialization within Russian children's homes immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union demonstrates the role of cultural norms, economic transition, and political ideologies in shaping emotion socialization over time. It also highlights how economic and political transition impact taken-for-granted assumptions within child development literature about what constitutes attachment and child love, family or kinship, and domesticity – particularly, parent–child interaction models of emotion socialization.

Emotion Socialization in the Context of Family Risks: Links to Child Emotion Regulation

The current study expands upon the extant literature by examining the influence of contextual risk factors (e.g., parental psychological distress, household income, educational attainment) on parental responses to children’s emotional experiences. Participants included 97 ethnically and demographically diverse mother–child dyads with children ranging in age from 7 to 12. Mothers reported indicators of supportive and unsupportive emotion socialization practices, and measures of child emotion regulation and emotion dysregulation. Higher scores on the familial risk index were positively related to increased emotion dysregulation and negatively related to decreased emotion regulation through mediated effects of mothers’ unsupportive reactions to children’s negative emotional expressions. These findings suggest the importance of considering contextual influences on the emotion socialization process and offer potential avenues to foster adaptive emotional development in the context of high risk.

Temperament and Maternal Emotion Socialization Beliefs as Predictors of Early Childhood Social Behavior in the Laboratory and Classroom

SYNOPOSIS Objective. The authors examined the roles of children's approach behavior and maternal emotion socialization practices in the development of social behavior in unfamiliar and familiar contexts from preschool to early childhood years. Design. At 4.5 years of age, children were observed, and an assessment of approach behavior was obtained; at this time, mothers reported about their emotion socialization beliefs. Two years later, children returned to the laboratory to participate in a peer play paradigm. When children were 7 years of age, teachers completed a questionnaire about children's social behaviors in the classroom. Results. Mothers' emotion socialization beliefs contribute to the developmental outcomes of approach behavior. For instance, observations of approach behaviors predicted a greater proportion of group play in the unfamiliar peer group when mothers reported highly supportive emotion socialization beliefs. Conclusion. Mothers' emotion socialization beliefs appear to play an important role in modifying the developmental course of approach behavior during early childhood.

Tuning in to Kids: improving emotion socialization practices in parents of preschool children – findings from a community trial

This study evaluated a new prevention and early intervention parenting program: Tuning in to Kids. The program aims to improve emotion socialization practices in parents of preschool children and is based on research evidence that parents' responses to, and coaching of, their children's emotions influence emotional and behavioral functioning in children. Two hundred and sixteen primary caregiver parents of children aged 4.0-5.11 years were randomized into an intervention or waitlist control group. Parents in the intervention condition attended a 6-session group parenting program plus two booster sessions. Assessment occurred pre-intervention, post-intervention and at six-month follow-up. Questionnaires assessed parent emotion awareness and regulation, parent beliefs and practices of emotion socialization (emotion dismissing, emotion coaching, empathy) and child behavior (parent and teacher report). Observation of emotion socialization practices and child emotional knowledge was conducted pre-intervention and at follow-up with 161 parent-child dyads. Parents in the intervention condition reported significant improvements in their own emotion awareness and regulation, increases in emotion coaching, and decreases in emotionally dismissive beliefs and behaviors. There were increases in parents' observed use of emotion labels and discussion of causes and consequences of emotions with their children. Child emotional knowledge improved, and reductions in child behavior problems were reported by parents and teachers. This study provides support for the efficacy of a parenting intervention targeting parent emotion socialization practices that lead to improved child emotional knowledge and behavior. This preventative intervention targeting parents' own emotion awareness and regulation, as well as emotional communication in parent-child relationships, is a promising addition to available parenting programs.

Parent, family, and child characteristics: associations with mother- and father-reported emotion socialization practices.

The present research examined parental beliefs about children's negative emotions, parent-reported marital conflict/ambivalence, and child negative emotionality and gender as predictors of mothers' and fathers' reported reactions to their kindergarten children's negative emotions and self-expressiveness in the family (N = 55, two-parent families). Models predicting parents' nonsupportive reactions and negative expressiveness were significant. For both mothers and fathers, more accepting beliefs about children's negative emotions were associated with fewer nonsupportive reactions, and greater marital conflict/ambivalence was associated with more negative expressiveness. Furthermore, interactions between child negative emotionality and parental resources (e.g., marital conflict/ambivalence; accepting beliefs) emerged for fathers' nonsupportive reactions and mothers' negative expressiveness. In some instances, child gender acted as a moderator such that associations between parental beliefs about emotions and the emotion socialization outcomes emerged when child and parent gender were concordant.

"I'd rather not talk about it": emotion parenting in families of children with an anxiety disorder.

This study examined emotion socialization practices in families of children with an anxiety disorder (AD; n = 28) and of children who had no diagnoses (ND; n = 28) and considered gender differences. Youth (aged 8-13) and both parents discussed times when the child felt anxious, angry, and happy, for 5 min each. Fathers of AD children engaged in less explanatory discussion of emotion overall and exhibited less positive affect and more negative affect when interacting with sons than did fathers of ND children. Similar patterns emerged for mothers, although specific results varied by emotion type and child gender. Children with an AD demonstrated less positive affect overall and engaged in fewer problem-solving emotion regulation strategies when discussing anxious and angry situations than did children in the ND group. In both AD and ND groups, fathers appeared to have greater involvement in emotion-related discussions with sons versus daughters. The results highlight parents' contributions to the emotional development of their children, the ways in which socialization may go awry in families of AD children, and the implications for children's emotional functioning.

Emotional Competence, Emotion Socialization, and Young Children's Peer-Related Social Competence

This study investigated linkages between aspects of emotional competence and preschoolers' social skills with peers. Whether parental emotion socialization practices contributed to the prediction of social skill once emotional competence was statistically controlled was also of interest. Eighty-one predominantly Caucasian preschoolers were videotaped as they participated in three same-sex triadic peer situations. Four peer variables were coded from the videotapes: social initiations, the frequency with which children were the targets of positive social bids, non-constructive anger-related reactions, and prosocial acts. The emotional competence measures included situation knowledge, children's explanations of emotions, positivity of emotional expression during peer play, and emotional intensity. Maternal anger directed at the child was the measure of emotion socialization. Results revealed that the emotional competence variables were meaningfully related to the peer variables and that, for non-constructive anger reactions, maternal reports of anger explained unique variance. Results are discussed in terms of how emotional competence and emotion socialization contribute to peer behavior and the importance of designing and implementing affective intervention programs for young children and their families.

Emotion Regulation in Low‐income Preschoolers

The present study was concerned with identifying the causes of low‐income preschoolers’ negative emotions and their most common regulation responses. The relations of family socialization practices and temperament to the children’s emotion regulation skills were also examined. Ninety predominantly minority low‐income preschoolers (46 boys) and their mothers participated. During visits to the children’s preschools, observers watched for expressions of anger and sadness, and recorded the causes of the displays and the children’s reactions. Mothers reported on their emotion socialization and discipline practices and their children’s temperament. Although the children expressed more anger than sadness, they used more constructive reactions in response to sadness and more non‐constructive reactions in response to anger. Maternal reports of appropriate family emotion were associated with low levels of non‐constructive regulation responses to anger and sadness whereas reports of inconsistent parental discipline were generally associated with non‐constructive regulation responses. All in all, the findings of this study are in accord with findings on middle‐income children and indicate that low‐ and middle‐income children are more alike than different with regard to the regulation of negative emotion in the peer environment.

Developmental trends in emotion understanding among a diverse sample of African-American preschool children

The contributions of age and cognitive-language skills to children's emotion understanding (e.g., recognition of facial expression and understanding of contextual cues for five basic emotions: happy, sad, mad, scared, and surprised; as well as children's application of their understanding of emotions to hypothetical situations requiring them to cope with maternal anger) were examined in a sample of 45 preschool-aged African-American children. These children came from diverse SES and parenting backgrounds, with a heavy concentration of the sample from disadvantaged homes. The results were similar to studies of Caucasian children. Specifically, the results indicated that both age and cognitive-language skills contribute to children's emotional understanding. However, the contribution of age to emotion understanding was more consistent than the contribution of cognitive-language skills. Judgments of anger showed an age-related increase in accuracy in the contextual cue condition but not in the facial cue condition. Compared to other samples, children in this study were fairly accurate at judging and identifying fear. The results are discussed in terms of parent emotion socialization practices and implications for children's emotional development.