Poster #210 - Predicting Child Emotion Talk: Mothers’ Emotion Talk and Positive Emotion Expressions

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Emotion talk is one aspect of socialization thought to contribute to children’s emotional competence (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson, 2007). Parental emotion talk predicts young children’s emotion talk (Dunn & Brown, 1994; Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006), and children’s emotion talk predicts their socioemotional competence (Garner, Dunsmore, & Southam-Gerow, 2008; Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008). However, this literature largely focuses on what parents say and less on how they say it (Laible & Thompson, 2000). This study focused on two aspects of how mothers use emotion terms. First, we examined whether mothers explained the emotion terms they used, above and beyond labeling emotions; explanations may enhance young children’s understanding of the terms (Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991). Second, we examined whether mothers’ nonverbal positive emotion during the task enhanced children’s emotion talk; positive emotion may broaden a person’s openness to information (Fredrickson, 1998, 2004) and evidence with mother-infant dyads suggests that maternal positive emotion may play a role in language learning and acquisition (Doan, 2010; Fernald, 1985; Fernald & Kuhl, 1987). Specifically, a mother’s positive facial expression and tone of voice may enhance the relation between explanations and child emotion talk.
The participants were 120 mothers and their 36-month-old children (46% female; 98% Caucasian; Mage = 36.44 months, SDage = 0.80). Mothers and children interacted for 5 minutes with a wordless book (Froggy series; Mayer & Mayer, 1975) during a laboratory visit, as part of a longitudinal study. We focused on child age 36 months because of the variability in child emotion talk at this age (67% did not produce any emotion talk in the task). This variability allowed us to test whether how mothers used emotion talk was associated with a greater likelihood of young children using the terms. We used a logistic regression framework, controlling for child gender, maternal sensitivity, maternal verbosity, and child receptive and expressive language.
Our analyses revealed four findings. First, as expected based on prior studies, the frequency of maternal emotion talk predicted child emotion talk (B = 0.148, p = .002). Second, contrary to our prediction, the proportion of maternal explanations about emotion did not predict child emotion talk (B = 0.784, p = .318). Third, maternal nonverbal positive emotion expressed during the task did not moderate the relation between either the frequency of maternal emotion talk or the proportion of maternal explanations (B = -0.002, p = .848; B = -0.099, p = .584, respectively) and child emotion talk. However, maternal nonverbal positive emotion predicted whether children used emotion talk, even after accounting for maternal explanations (B = .096, p = .046).
Our findings are the first to suggest that maternal nonverbal emotion may influence a young child’s emotion talk over and above parental sensitivity and child gender or language ability. We discuss future directions for investigating the role of parental nonverbal emotion as a feature of the quality of emotion talk, including design improvements that more closely capture the flow of the dyadic interaction during emotion talk.

Authors

• Lauren Vazquez, The Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author

• Laura Marie Armstrong, UNC-Charlotte
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pamela M. Cole, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author