Poster #218 - The Socialization of Social-Emotional Learning in Early Childhood: Child Outcomes Moderated by Socioeconomic Risk

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Emotional competence (EC) is crucial for preschoolers’ social relationships and school success across time. Teachers perform emotion socialization behaviors (i.e., expressing, contingently responding, and teaching) like parents’, but scant research corroborates their importance. We expected teachers’ discussion of emotions during joint book-reading, and self-reports of emotions in the classroom, reactions to children’s emotions, and attitudes about teaching emotions to function like parents’ in contributing to emotion knowledge growth across an academic year, with moderation by socioeconomic risk.
Participants included 83 teachers and 337 preschoolers attending early care settings where families experienced little economic difficulty, or economic risk (predominantly Head Start). Child data was collected in fall and spring. Affect Knowledge Test-Shortened (AKT-S) addressed children’s ability to identify expressions of emotions, and unequivocal and equivocal emotional situations. A z-score aggregate of all AKT-S items was used in this study. For socialization of emotion, teachers’ teaching about emotions was gleaned from their reading of two emotionally-evocative wordless picturebooks. Transcribed reading sessions were coded for use of positive and negative emotion words, and functions of emotion utterances (i.e., commenting, clarification, or explaining). Teachers’ self-reports of emotional expressiveness, contingent responding, and emotion teaching were assessed with Classroom Expressiveness Questionnaire (CEQ), Teachers’ Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (TCCNES), and Teacher Emotion Socialization Self-Test (TESST), respectively. Previously validated measures showed adequate reliability (internal consistency, interrater).
In multilevel modeling analyses, class membership accounted for significant amounts of AKT-S’s variance (ICC = .16, p < .001). Separate models were created for each source of emotion socialization data, with socioeconomic risk, socialization of emotion scores, and their interactions as Level 2 predictors, controlling for age, gender, and fall measures at Level 1. Level 2 findings are shown in Table 1 and Figure 1; child age and fall AKT-S predicted spring emotion knowledge in all equations.
Overall, there were few main effects of socialization of emotion, except for TCCNES distress and minimizing reactions predicting growth in emotion knowledge, with the opposite pattern for punitive reactions. Risk was generally associated with fewer emotion knowledge gains.
In contrast, child socioeconomic risk moderated several findings . Figure 1 shows that teachers’ use of negative emotion words in book reading, positive emotional expressiveness and emotion coaching teaching style were associated with growth in emotion knowledge for children in classes serving those at socioeconomic risk, with the opposite trend for positive emotion words. Main effect contributions of distress and punitive reactions to children’s negative emotions were also moderated by risk status; contributions were strongest for children not at risk. An aggregate of positive TCCNES subscales was associated with emotion knowledge growth for children at risk (β= 0.16, p < .05).
Teachers of at-risk children were more highly educated and paid, and more likely to be African-American (as were their pupils). Socialization of emotion had important meanings in their classrooms that differed from its somewhat more limited contributions to children not at socioeconomic risk. Further implications and mechanisms will be considered, and results will be viewed toward informing teacher professional development.

Authors

• Susanne A. Denham, George Mason University
  Presenting Author

• David E. Ferrier, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hideko H. Bassett, George Mason University
  Non-Presenting Author