Poster #207 - General and Specific Elements of Parental Emotion Socialization: Associations with Chinese Children’s Socio-emotional Functioning

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Parental emotion socialization is a multi-faceted construct comprising general and specific emotion-related parenting factors, which are salient in fostering children’s socio-emotional functioning (Eisenberg et al., 1998). General factors, for instance, parents’ meta-emotion, which refer to their values, beliefs, and goals regarding the expression and experience of emotions, form the emotional climate in the family, and are indirect means parents socialize emotions in their children (Gottman et al., 1997). On the contrary, specific factors, such as parents’ reaction, which refers to their contingent responses to children’s expressed emotions, are parents’ direct efforts at socializing emotions that children experience (Fabes et al., 2002). Although the extensive body of work provides credible evidence of the value of both general and specific parental emotion socialization factors for children’s socio-emotional development within Western cultural contexts (Eisenberg et al., 1998), the accrued evidence underscores the conceptual and empirical investigation of both processes within Eastern cultural contexts (Chen et al., 2011).

In this study, we advance and evaluate a model that conceptualizes parents’ emotion socialization as having both general and specific factors that in turn have general and specific associations with children’s socio-emotional functioning within a specific Eastern cultural context—China. With a sample of 283 Chinese children aged 9-12, we examined the general and domain-specific factors of five parents’ emotion socialization strategies as unique predictors of children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms, as assessed by the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001). The five strategies include: (a) Neglect (i.e., parents do not pay attention to the child’s emotions), (b) Override (i.e., parents disregard or remain indifferent to the child’s emotions), (c) Magnify (i.e., parents reflect the same emotion as that expressed by the child), (d) Reward (i.e., parents help the child feels better or help solve his problems), and (e) Punish (i.e., parents use negative consequences to discourage the child’s expression of emotions). Evidence indicates that these five strategies reflect the general factor of parents’ meta-emotion and can be organized into two specific factors; Neglect, Punish and Magnify are subsumed by negative parental reaction, and Reward and Override are subsumed by positive parental reaction (O’Neal & Magai, 2005).

Using a bifactor analytic approach, we tested the extent to which the bifactor model fits the data and compared this fit to a one-factor model that considers an overarching general factor of parental emotion socialization, and a first-order factor model that distinguishes distinct modes of emotion-related parenting processes (Figure 1). Then, we examined the extent to which the general and specific factors of parental emotion socialization predict children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. As shown in Table 1, the bifactor model indicates the best fit; the specific factor, in particular positive parental reaction, but not the general factor of parental emotion socialization, predicts negatively children’s externalizing symptoms. The conceptual and methodological contributions of parental emotion socialization as a multi-faceted construct comprising general and specific factors, and their distal and proximal bearings on children’s development will be discussed within an Eastern cultural context—China (Chen et al., 2011).

Authors

• GeckHong Yeo, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Acton Feng, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stella Dai Ling Sun, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  Non-Presenting Author