Happy, sad, or yucky? Parental emotion talk with infants in a book‐sharing task

Abstract

For decades, researchers, practitioners, and parents have been interested in assessing and improving children's emotion reasoning abilities. Emotion reasoning-or the ability to adaptively infer, predict, and respond to others' emotions-predicts positive social and academic outcomes across the lifespan (Izard et al., 2001). To assess emotion reasoning abilities, researchers typically ask

“Oh no! What happened?” an investigation of parent–child conversations about self-conscious emotions.

“…As mentioned previously, past research found that parents direct more questions to their children depending on the emotion being discussed. Since the types of questions asked may elicit different responses and vary by emotion, this study examined two different qualities of questions: causal questions and knowledge questions (e.g., Kearsley, 1976; Ruba et al, 2022). Causal questions were characterized by seeking to understand and address antecedent and consequent information (e.g., “why does she feel like that?”), whereas knowledge questions focused on the child’s fact-based knowledge (e.g., “how does she feel?”).…”

“…Parents also use questions to elicit children's commentary about emotions. Recent work found positive relations between parent questions and children's emotion talk (e.g., Ruba et al, 2022), though these did not include self-conscious emotions. Whether this guided focus also influences children's own experiences encountering self-conscious emotions is an interesting question for future research (see LoBue & Ogren, 2022).…”

“…"; Kearsley, 1976) may induce discussions about emotion labels CONVERSATIONS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUS EMOTIONS and be linked to increased emotion identification. Recent findings suggest that children's productive emotion state labeling is positively correlated with parent's causal questions (Ruba et al, 2022).…”

“…Parent causal questions (e.g., “what is making him sad?”) may elicit more causal talk and be linked to better understanding of emotion antecedents, whereas knowledge-based questions (hereafter referred to as knowledge questions , e.g., “what emotion is that?”; Kearsley, 1976) may induce discussions about emotion labels and be linked to increased emotion identification. Recent findings suggest that children’s productive emotion state labeling is positively correlated with parent’s causal questions (Ruba et al, 2022).…”

Links between parent–child conversations about emotions and changes in children's emotion knowledge across early childhood

“…A large body of work suggests that parents likely play a vital role in the socialization of children's emotion knowledge , or the ability to correctly identify expressions of emotion and situational referents that elicit emotion (Denham, 2019). For instance, parents teach about emotions by providing labels (e.g., Knothe & Walle, 2018), elaborating on the situational referents, or causes, of emotions (Martin & Green, 2005), and asking questions that can elicit children's emotion talk (Ruba et al, 2022). Children are also active participants in acquiring emotion knowledge.…”