Poster #136 - Keeping it Discrete: How Parents and Children Talk About Discrete Emotions Across Early Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Background: Children’s emotion knowledge is linked to myriad important social outcomes (Eisenberg et al., 2005) and is influenced by emotion labeling during parent-child interactions (Denham, 2019). Less is known, however, how parent and child emotion labeling are related, particularly across development. Moreover, recent work has highlighted how parents and children differentially label discrete emotions (Knothe & Walle, 2018), but whether these differences persist across development is unknown. Given ongoing debate as to whether there are “basic emotions” that are universally expressed and recognized (see Barrett et al., 2019; Keltner et al., 2019), investigating parent-child discussions about emotions could further advance our understanding of the developmental origins of emotion knowledge and socialization mechanisms.

Methods: We examined parent-child discussions about emotions in a structured naturalistic context. Children (N = 256, 115 girls) and their primary caregiver (62% White, 9% Black, 19% Hispanic, 3% Asian American, 7% ‘Other;’ median annual income = $50,000–$80,000) from a large metropolitan area in the Southwest United States participated in two waves across a one-year period. At W1 (Mage = 2.45 years, SD = .26) and W2 (Mage = 3.51 years, SD = .26), parents and children discussed novel wordless images depicting different cartoon children expressing facially and posturally an emotion (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, joy) in response to an elicitor (e.g., dropping ice cream). A separate adult sample (N = 105) validated each stimulus as expressing the intended emotion (range = 80.95%-93.81%). Discussions were transcribed using an automated transcription service and emotion labels were extracted using a Python script.

Results: We first examined longitudinal relations between parent and child emotion labeling. We specified a path model predicting children’s W2 emotion labels with children’s W1 emotion labels and parents’ W1 and W2 emotion labels as predictors. Direct pathways were specified from Parents’ W1 emotion labels to Children’s W1 emotion labels as well as Parents’ W2 emotion labels. We probed all indirect pathways from parents’ W1 emotion labels to children’s W2 emotion labels. Model Fit and standardized coefficients are presented in Figure 1. Children’s W2 emotion labels were directly related to concurrent parent emotion labeling and indirectly related to earlier parent emotion labelling.

We next examined mean differences in children’s and parents’ emotion labels using a factorial repeated measures generalized mixed linear model with emotion and wave as fixed effects. Similar patterns of model results emerged for children and parents. Specifically, children’s and parents’ labels differed as a function of emotion (ps < .001), though not by wave or the Emotion × Wave interaction (ps = .28). Estimated marginal means and standard errors of children’s and parents’ emotion labels are displayed in Table 1. Children labeled disgust more than fear, sadness, and joy, and labeled joy less than anger and disgust. Parents labeled disgust more than all other emotions and joy less than all other emotions.

Taken together, these results highlight nuanced relations and emphasis in parent-child discussions of emotions. Implications for the socialization of emotion knowledge will be discussed.

Authors

• Peter J Reschke, Brigham Young University
  Presenting Author

• Gavin Conner Jones, Brigham Young University

• Chris L Porter, Brigham Young University

• Laura Stockdale, Brigham Young University

• Sarah M Coyne, Brigham Young University