Although investigators have proposed in various theories that the socialization of emotions has important implications for children's general competence, very little empirical data exist. In the present study, parents' responses to the emotional distress of their preschool children were examined in the context of more general dimensions of parenting (warmth and control), and the relation of these responses to children's competence was assessed. Data on parent-child interactions were collected for 30 families, using home observations, parent self-reports, observer ratings, and child interviews. Children's competence in preschool was assessed by teacher ratings. Effective, situationally appropriate action was the most frequently observed parental response to children's upset, and children's attributions to parents of such pragmatic responses was positively related to their competence in preschool. Parental encouragement of emotional expressiveness was also positively associated with child competence. Variables assessing positive responses to upset, although related to warmth (as expected), also contributed independently to children's competence.

Relations between emotional expressiveness, empathy, and prosocial behaviors are important for theoretical and practical reasons. In this study, all 3 areas were assessed across methods and sources. Emotional expressiveness and empathy were evaluated in 73 children in 3 age groups (5‐, 9‐, and 13‐year‐olds) by measuring facial and verbal responses to emotionally evocative videotapes and by ratings from best friends, parents, and teachers. Measures of emotional insight and role taking were also obtained. Prosocial behaviors were assessed by 3 laboratory tasks and by ratings from best friends, parents, and teachers. Confirming expectations, latent variable path analyses (Lohmöller, 1984) indicated that emotional expressiveness, emotional insight, and role taking were strong predictors of latent empathy (multiple R2= .60). Boys' empathy, in turn, was a strong predictor of prosocial behavior, R2= .55. In contrast, girls' empathy was related to prosocial behaviors with friends, R2= .13, but not to cooperation with peers. Thus present findings provide important support and clarification for certain theoretical expectations, and also raise issues that need clarification.

In Roberts and Strayer (1996), we reported that emotional expressiveness and anger were important predictors of empathy for school-age children, and that empathy strongly predicted prosocial behaviors aggregated across methods and sources. In this paper, we report how empathy was associated with direct observations of anger and aggression in peer play groups. Twenty-four initially unacquainted five-year-old children (50% girls) were randomly assigned to six same-sex groups; each group met for three one-hour play sessions. Physical and verbal aggression, object struggles and anger were coded from videotapes, as were prosocial and social behaviors. As expected, empathy (aggregated across methods and sources) was negatively associated with aggression and anger, and positively associated with prosocial behaviors. Although children who were more angry were also more aggressive, anger and aggression did not covary across play sessions as a simple causal model requires. These results suggest further directions for research in emotions and aggression.Empathy and anger are thought to have important consequences for children's prosocial behavior, aggression, and social relationships (Denham

In Roberts and Strayer (1996)

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