Poster #91 - Parent Emotional Intelligence and Responses to Children's Negative Emotions

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

According to Eisenberg et al. (1998), socialization of emotion plays a critical role in the development of social competence. One way in which parents socialize children’s emotions is through reactions to their children’s negative emotions (Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad, 1998). A parent can react to their children’s negative emotions positively, by helping the child express their emotion or fix the problem, but can also react negatively, by punishing the child or dismissing their emotion. Parents who are calm and comforting toward their children have children who have higher emotion knowledge, while parents who are less supportive have children who hide their emotions or may express them in unhealthy ways (Denham and Kochanoff, 2002; Denham et al., 1997). Given these disparate outcomes, it is valuable to understand why parents react the way that they do. In this study, we examine parent emotional intelligence as a possible predictor of responses to negative emotions. One hundred parents of children aged 6-12 filled out the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue), the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES), and demographic questions. Parents who scored higher on emotional intelligence tended to have more “supportive” reactions to their children’s negative emotions, while parents who scored lower had more “unsupportive” reactions to their children’s negative emotions (see Figure 1). Additionally, several associations were found between subscales of the TEIQue and subscales of the CCNES, implicating relationships between certain aspects of emotional intelligence and certain reactions to negative emotions (see Table 1). We found relationships between Emotionality and the three “supportive” responses: Expressive (encouraging the child to express their emotion), Emotion-Focused (helping the child feel better), and Problem-Focused (helping the child solve the problem that caused the emotion) reactions. This implies that perhaps those who are more emotionally expressive are more likely to respond to their children’s emotions in adaptive ways. Additionally, we found negative relationships between Self Control and Minimization (downplaying the importance of the child’s emotion), and between Self Control and Distress (the parent becoming distressed themselves). This could mean that parents do not want to respond to their children’s negative emotions with distress and minimization; it is simply the lack of emotional regulation that causes them to respond in that way. Lastly, we found a relationship between Sociability and Expressive reactions, perhaps indicating that those parents who are more aware of the nuances of social interactions also understand to a greater degree how important it is to help children express their emotions. The results of this study point to reactions to negative emotions as a potential mechanism through which parental emotional intelligence affects children’s socio-emotional skills.

Author

• Jessica Gruenstein, Adelphi University
  Presenting Author