Parents’ Beliefs about Emotions and Children’s Recognition of Parents’ Emotions

Abstract

This study investigated parents’ emotion-related beliefs, experience, and expression, and children’s recognition of their parents’ emotions with 40 parent-child dyads. Parents reported beliefs about danger and guidance of children’s emotions. While viewing emotion-eliciting film clips, parents self-reported their emotional experience and masking of emotion. Children and observers rated videos of parents watching emotion-eliciting film clips. Fathers reported more masking than mothers and their emotional expressions were more difficult for both observers and children to recognize compared with mothers’ emotional expressions. For fathers, but not mothers, showing clearer expressions was related to children’s general skill at recognizing emotional expressions. Parents who believe emotions are dangerous reported greater masking of emotional expression. Contrary to hypothesis, when parents strongly believe in guiding their child’s emotion socialization, children showed less accurate recognition of their parents’ emotions.

“Practice What You Preach”: Teachers’ Perceptions of Emotional Competence and Emotionally Supportive Classroom Practices

“…Research on the socialization of emotional competence has routinely drawn connections between a caregiver's knowledge of and appreciation for emotions and children's resultant emotional ability (Denham & Kochanoff, 2002;Dunsmore, Her, Halberstadt, & Perez-Rivera, 2009;Eisenberg et al, 2003;Valiente, Fabes, Eisenberg, & Spinrad, 2004). Our findings extend this connection to preschool classrooms.…”

EUReKA! A Conceptual Model of Emotion Understanding

“…Because some measures could be expanded to assess specific skill-foci combinations for which the measure has not yet been used, we coded potential scoring as well; thus, we included lower-case letters, s (self-potential), o (other-potential), and g (general-potential), to designate that this measure has the potential to be used for this additional skill-focus. For example, emotion recognition measures utilizing naturalistic methods such as recognition of familiar others’ emotions during ongoing interactions (referred to as in vivo decoding; e.g., Dunsmore, Her, Halberstadt, & Perez-Rivera, 2009) often include spontaneous expressions of emotion in the Self and Other; such measures may also include prototypical expressions of both Self and Other foci, as well as the use of contextual cues to recognize emotions in the Other. Finally, we report the primary age groups for which the measure or technique was designed.…”

“…Approximately 64% of measures assess two to three skills, and two emotion knowledge measures assess four skills. All available skills are included in only three emotion recognition measures (see Dunsmore et al, 2009; Magill-Evans, Koning, Cameron-Sadava, & Manyk, 1995; Rosenthal, Hall, DiMatteo, Rogers, & Archer, 1979) and one emotion knowledge measure (see Lane et al, 1990). All other things being equal (e.g.…”

Is believing seeing? The role of emotion-related beliefs in selective attention to affective cues

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