Children’s Emotion Socialization in Sociocultural Context

• In Event: 1-018 - Coming Back to (South) Baltimore: A Symposium Honoring the Career of Peggy Miller

Integrative Statement

Parents play an important role in young children’s emotion socialization, influencing their developing understanding and expression of emotions. Research has identified mothers’ beliefs about emotions and parent-child emotion talk practices as important factors (Dunsmore et al., 2009), although considerably less is known about the emotion-related beliefs and practices of fathers and parents across diverse cultures. Moreover, most research tends to focus on one mode of emotion expression and one context for socialization (e.g., emotion talk during family conversations) rather than considering multiple modes of expression (e.g., verbal and nonverbal expressions) across multiple storytelling contexts (e.g., shared personal storytelling and bookreading). In line with P. Miller’s (2018) recommendation for a multi-method, contextual approach to studying children’s socialization, this study examines the roles of gender and culture on parental beliefs about emotion and their emotion-related practices, and examines patterns of emotion expression across multiple storytelling contexts.

Participants included 123 parents from Seoul, S. Korea (80 mothers, 43 fathers), 106 parents from Minnesota, USA (69 mothers, 37 fathers), and their preschool-aged children. Parents completed measures assessing their beliefs about children’s emotions (PBAF, Dunsmore & Karn, 2001) and their reactions/strategies for dealing with children’s emotion expressions (CCNES, Fabes et al., 2002). Parent-child dyads were later videotaped engaging in a series of storytelling tasks, including co-narrating children’s past emotional experiences and reading a book about emotions together. These observations were transcribed and multiple modes of emotion expression were coded, including the frequency and variety of parents’ emotion talk (e.g., emotion words and phrases) and nonverbal emotion expressions (e.g., facial/bodily expressions).

Results from 2(culture) x 2(parent gender) x 2(child gender) MANOVAs revealed significant cultural and gender variation in how parents think about and respond to children’s emotions. Significant main effects of culture (U.S.>Korea, p<.001) and gender (mothers>fathers, p<.001) were found for PBAF. Interestingly, PBAF significantly predicted CCNES scores for Korean parents, but associations were inconsistent for American parents. We also examined the extent to which gender and storytelling context affected American parents’ expressions of emotion. We found that mothers utilized greater emotion talk than fathers during co-narrating children’s experiences (p=.05) but not during bookreading (p=.19). For bookreading, mothers used more nonverbal expressions than fathers did (p=.01), and parents of daughters used more emotion talk than parents of sons (p=.03). PBAF scores were significantly associated with emotion talk during bookreading (p=.04), but not during co-narrating. PBAF scores were not associated with nonverbal emotion expressions.

While parents’ beliefs about emotions are important in guiding their emotion-related practices with children, our findings reveal considerable variation by sociocultural and storytelling contexts. While Americans held more positive beliefs about emotions than Koreans, Korean parents’ beliefs were more strongly associated with their practices. Our study also revealed that mothers and fathers may model emotions for their children differently; mothers held more positive emotion beliefs, engaged in greater emotion talk when co-narrating children’s experiences, and greater nonverbal expressions during bookreading. Interestingly, mothers did not differ from fathers in emotion talk during bookreading, possibly due to the more structured nature of the bookreading context.

Author

• Grace Cho, St. Olaf College
  Presenting Author