Everyday Emotions: Families’ Verbal Expressions of Amusement, Compassion, Gratitude and Pride in Naturalistic Data

• In Event: 2-206 - Designing a Naturalistic Observational Study of Children and Families 40 Years Later

Integrative Statement

Parental expressions of positive emotion are related to a host of positive outcomes for children (e.g. Eisenberg et al., 2003), yet little is known about the form and frequency of specific positive emotion expressions in daily family life (Fitness, 2013). Capitalizing on transcripts from a unique video archive of 32 families interacting in their homes and communities, this naturalistic observation study describes the rates at which mothers, fathers and school age children verbally expressed amusement, compassion, gratitude and pride across a day. Naturalistic methods are ideally suited to the study of family members’ everyday expressions of emotion as they capture the mundane, repeated emotional moments that weave the fabric of day-to-day life (Repetti, Wang & Sears, 2013). These expressions help to create a family’s emotional climate, but a quick “Well done!” for tooth brushing may not be memorable enough to factor into an estimate on a questionnaire and would not be captured in a structured puzzle-solving task.
The present investigation is part of a larger “week in the life” study in which families were recorded on four days, with no instruction about how to spend their time. Two videographers trained in ethnographic recording methods followed the members to allow for continuous recording and natural movement within their regular settings. This open-ended design allowed us to assess spontaneous, unprompted expressions of positive emotions across a wide range of situations, such as mealtimes, homework, television viewing, car rides, and soccer practice. Our analyses focus on one day of recording from each family, representing, on average, over 8 hours of screen time per family (range = 3.87 – 14.35). Because specific positive emotions are best differentiated on the basis of verbal expressions, we applied a dictionary of specific emotion keywords to the transcripts to locate potential emotional moments. Keywords were then judged in context to determine if they were indeed expressions of the emotion. The specific emotions were reliably identified and differentiated (Cohen’s Kappas: amusement: .88, compassion: .95, gratitude: .94, pride: .90).
Families expressed positive emotions quite often, on average 16 expressions per hour, and there was great variability between families (range: 5.18 – 32.96; SD = 7.25). Capturing interactions at different points in the day showed that expressions of compassion (e.g. “are you okay”) and pride (e.g. “excellent”) were not reserved for rare instances of pain or accomplishment but were uttered two to three times an hour by parents and once an hour by children (see Figure 1). The frequencies and variances suggest that observations of emotions at the quotidian level could add novel information to what psychologists already know from family-members’ self-reports and from structured laboratory situations intended to elicit particular emotions.
Our comparisons of mother-child and father-child interactions contribute to the need for a better understanding of fathers’ behavior (Cabrera, Volling & Barr, 2018). Fathers verbally expressed less gratitude (d = .57*) and marginally less compassion (d = .38†) toward their children than mothers did. In parallel, boys expressed less compassion (d = -1.15*) and gratitude (d = -1.09*) than did girls.

Authors

• Galen D. McNeil, University of California, Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Rena L. Repetti, University of California, Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author