Poster #151 - Parents’ indirect elaboration during emotion-laden reminiscing and children’s emotion understanding

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

One way that parents teach children about emotions is through shared discussions (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998), including reminiscing, or reflecting on past emotional experiences (Salmon & Reese, 2016). Extant research on parent-child reminiscing has examined parental elaborative style—a narrative style that involves asking questions, providing descriptive information about the event, and incorporating children’s responses into the conversation (Fivush & Fromhoff, 1988). In the current study, we extend current research by distinguishing between linguistic directness and indirectness, both of which have been discussed in linguistics literature since the 1970s (Austin, 1975; Grice, 1975; Searle, 1976), and applying these concepts to parental elaborative style during reminiscing. Because indirectness is especially common during potentially embarrassing topics such as emotion (Brown & Levinson, 1987), we examine parents’ indirect elaboration during emotion-laden reminiscing.

In direct speech, utterances feature a 1:1 mapping between their form and intended function and can be quickly interpreted, whereas in indirect speech a speaker communicates something other than the literal meaning of what is said, requiring the hearer to draw an inference (Searle, 1976). Thus, parents’ indirect communication may require children to “cognitively unpack” parents’ utterances in order to interpret them, promoting deeper processing and increasing the salience of parents’ messages (Grusec & Goodnow, 1994). During emotion-laden reminiscing, parents’ indirect communication of elaboration may promote children’s understanding of emotion as they are forced to unpack and decode these utterances. In the current study, we distinguished between parents’ direct elaboration and parents’ indirect elaboration during conversations about emotions, hypothesizing that parents’ indirect communication of elaborative utterances would be associated with children’s emotion understanding (beyond effects of parents’ direct elaborative utterances).

Participants were 55 parents with their 4- to 5-year-old children (56% girls). Parent-child dyads completed a 5-minute discourse task in which they discussed times the child was upset and happy. Conversations were transcribed and coded for parents’ elaboration (Fivush & Fromhoff, 1988) and use of indirectness, based on the mismatch of utterance form and function (Searle, 1976). Interrater reliability was sufficient for both elaboration (κ= .78) and indirectness (κ= .81). Elaborative utterances were classified as direct or indirect based on the previously assigned codes from the two independent coding groups. Children’s emotion understanding was assessed with the Affective Knowledge Task (Denham, 1986).

Stepwise regressions were conducted separately for positive and negative event discussions, controlling for child sex and age (step one), for the proportion of direct elaborative utterances (step two), and lastly, the proportion of indirect elaborative utterances (step three), which was the variable of interest. Results showed that parents’ indirect elaboration during positive event discussions was associated with better emotion understanding. See Tables 1 and 2. This finding did not hold for negative event discussions, perhaps because negative event discussions are more effortful for parent-child dyads (Sales, Fivush, & Peterson, 2003). By engaging in indirect communication during emotion-laden reminiscing, parents may require children to more deeply process emotion talk, thus improving children’s emotion understanding. Results suggest benefits for the field in distinguishing between linguistic directness and linguistic indirectness.

Authors

• Erika Hernandez, Virginia Tech
  Presenting Author

• Katie Carmichael, Virginia Tech
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sukran Kilic, Aksaray University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Julie Dunsmore, Virginia Tech
  Non-Presenting Author