Poster #102 - Maternal emotion-related discourse and child social competence: Moderation by mothers’ belief about knowing children’s emotions

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

Parents’ emotion talk in everyday conversations influences children’s social competence (SC). Research has long shown benefits of labelling and explaining emotions (e.g., Dunn et al., 1991; Denham & Auerbach, 1995). More recently, linguistic indirectness, or mismatch in form and function of language conveying non-literal meaning (Searle, 1976), has been applied to parent-child emotion discourse (Hernandez et al., 2018, 2021). Parents’ emotion-related beliefs are potential moderators of impacts of emotion socialization behaviors, such as discourse (Dunsmore & Halberstadt, 1997). During middle childhood, increased emotional skills and expectations of emotional privacy and autonomy may affect indirectness functions (Hernandez et al., 2021). Thus, parents’ belief about the importance of knowing their child’s emotions [knowledge belief] may be a developmentally-salient moderator during middle childhood. Important elements of SC include prosocial behavior (i.e., sharing; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1991), internalizing behavior (i.e., withdrawal) and externalizing behavior (i.e., aggression; Gilliom & Shaw, 2004). We examined whether mothers’ knowledge belief moderated relations of emotion-related discourse with SC in middle childhood.
Participants were 137 mother-child dyads from the southeastern United States who participated in a 9-minute emotion discourse task when children were 9-year-olds as part of a larger study (54% boys, 46% girls; 68% White, 25% Black, 7% multi-racial). Conversations were transcribed, separated into subject-verb phrases (SVP), and coded for mothers’ use of emotion labels and explanations (Cervantes & Callahan, 1998) and mothers’ linguistic indirectness (Hernandez et al., 2018). All transcripts have been coded for indirectness, and 71% have been coded for labels/explanations. All coding will be complete by December. Interrater reliability is satisfactory for both types of coding (Ks > .60). Scores for maternal emotion labels/explanations and indirectness are proportions of mothers’ total SVPs to account for verbosity. Mothers reported knowledge belief (Parents’ Beliefs about Children’s Emotions Questionnaire, Halberstadt et al., 2013) and children’s externalizing and internalizing behaviors (Child Behavior Checklist, Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001). Children self-reported prosocial behavior (Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire, Goodman et al., 1998). Child prosocial behavior scores, externalizing behavior t-scores, and internalizing behavior t-scores were standardized. Externalizing and internalizing were reversed so that higher scores would indicate more SC for all behaviors.
We conducted two multivariate regressions (one for labels/explanations, one for indirectness) with preliminary data to test whether mothers’ knowledge belief moderated relations of emotion discourse with SC (within-subjects: prosocial, reverse-scored internalizing, reverse-scored externalizing). The between-subjects interaction of labels/explanations with knowledge belief was significant, F (1, 93) = 4.05, p = .047. When mothers’ knowledge belief was low, greater use of labels/explanations related to higher child SC (Figure 1). The within-subjects factor of type of SC interacted with the between-subjects predictors of indirectness and knowledge belief, F (1, 93) = 4.05, p = .047. Follow-up univariate analyses showed this effect was significant only for prosocial behavior. There was a positive relation of indirectness with prosocial behavior when knowledge belief was high, and a negative relation when knowledge belief was low (Figure 2). Results suggest that parental emotion-related beliefs may alter effects of discourse. Future research should further examine linguistic indirectness in emotion discourse.

Authors

• Stephanie Navarro, University of Houston
  Presenting Author

• Maiah C. Jackson

• Julie C Dunsmore, University of Houston