Poster #108 - “Is it Okay for Boys to Talk About Feelings?” Children’s Developing Beliefs About Emotion Talk

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

Humans frequently talk about their emotions (Rimé et al., 2020), but little is known about the development of children’s beliefs about emotion talk (i.e., the volitional verbal sharing of emotional states). We examined children’s beliefs about emotion talk in two domains: social affiliation and gender rules.

Sixty-four 5 to 8-year-olds viewed four cartoon stories of children who attend school together. The main character shared a past emotional state (positive or negative) with one character (emotion child) and similar information without an emotional state with the other character (non-emotion child). Then children answered three social affiliation questions in which they chose who the main character plays with, eats lunch with, and is friends with. Next, children answered questions to assess their explicit and implicit beliefs about gender and emotion talk. For the explicit beliefs, we asked four direct questions about gender and emotion talk such as, “Is it okay for boys to talk about their feelings?”. For the implicit beliefs, we showed children cartoon characters (half girls and half boys) and asked them to choose the one who “always talks about their feelings” and “never talks about their feelings”.

Children’s social inferences based on emotion talk varied as a function of participant age and gender. There was a main effect of participant gender, p = .03, and age, p = .02. On average, girls chose the emotion child more than boys, and younger children chose the emotion child more often than older children. These main effects were influenced by a significant interaction, p = .02. Boys became less likely to choose the emotion child with age, but girls’ choice of the emotion child stayed constant with age (Figure 1).

Overall, children did not show strong gender stereotypes about emotion talk. The majority of children said that it was okay for both boys and girls to talk about their feelings. However, children’s explicit gender beliefs predicted choosing the emotion child on the social affiliation questions (Figure 2). For the stories featuring boy characters, children who said boys “never” talk about feelings chose the emotion child less than children who said boys talk about feelings a little bit”, p = .04, or “a lot”, p = .03. In contrast, children’s explicit beliefs about girls and emotion talk did not predict their social inferences for the boy character stories or the girl character stories.

Together, these findings offer new insights into children’s developing meta-emotional knowledge about the social function of emotion talk and the development of gender specific beliefs about emotion talk.

Authors

• Ashley Shea Ransom, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Eve De Rosa, Cornell University

• Adam Anderson, Cornell University

• Lin Bian, University of Chicago