2-058 - Emotion Socialization: Past, Present, and Future

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Twenty years ago, Eisenberg and colleagues (1998) put forth a model surrounding the socialization of emotion and posited that characteristics of the child, parent, culture, and context predicted emotion-related socialization behaviors. In turn, these behaviors were theorized to set the stage for children’s social behavior and social competence through their impact on children’s arousal and socioemotional skills such as emotion regulation, emotion talk, and emotion understanding.

This symposium takes a longitudinal and multicultural approach and sheds light on how the field of emotion socialization has grown, and how our understanding of the mediational and moderating processes has expanded. The papers span from early childhood through emerging adulthood and use multi-method and multi-reporter designs to examine cross-cultural application of various emotion socialization processes and their links to adjustment across multiple developmental domains.

Study 1 examines whether reactions to children’s negative emotions in early childhood are associated with adjustment in adolescence through children’s physiological and behavioral emotion regulation in middle childhood. Study 2 examines parental emotion talk and tests whether talking about emotions predicts school-aged children’s later effortful control and socio-emotional competence in a Chinese American sample. Study 3 also uses a Chinese American sample to examine whether parental autonomy support and low psychological control during adolescence is associated with internalizing and externalizing problems during emerging adulthood through emotion regulation in adolescence. Our discussant, an expert in the area of emotion socialization, will draw on findings from these studies, and her own work, to speak to future directions in emotion socialization research.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Nicole Perry, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Discussant

• Nancy Eisenberg, Arizona State University

Individual Presentations

• Childhood Emotion Socialization and Adolescent Adjustment: Indirect Effects through Emotion Regulation - Presenting Author: Nicole Perry, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica Dollar, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Calkins, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Phillips Keane, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Parental Emotion Talk in Chinese American Families: Links to Children’s Effortful Control and Socio-emotional Development - Presenting Author: Qing Zhou, University of California Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Kaley Curtis, Graduate Student

• Roles of Parental Autonomy Support and Emotion Regulation on Behavior Problems in Chinese American Adolescents - Presenting Author: Jeffrey Liew, Texas A&M University; Non-Presenting Author: Zhiqing Zhou, Texas A&M University; Non-Presenting Author: Dorothy Pang, Texas A&M University; Non-Presenting Author: Yu-Chen Yeh, Texas A&M University; Non-Presenting Author: Oiman Kwok, Texas A&M University