The Relationship Between Parent Emotion Beliefs, Shared Book Reading and Children’s Emotion Regulation Strategies

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Parent-child discourse plays an important role in children’s emotional development and can occur through different mediums. For example, during shared book-reading, children whose parents focused more on the emotional aspects of a book showed greater empathy, greater understanding of emotions, and more prosocial attitudes. When parents focused more on the general aspects of the book, children only showed greater empathy (Schapira & Aram, 2019).
In addition to parent-child discourse, parents’ beliefs about their own emotions and their beliefs about their children’s emotions also affect the socialization of their children’s understanding, experience, expression, and emotion regulation abilities (Cole & Tan, 2007; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). Past research has focused on how parent-child discourse affects children’s emotion understanding and empathy, but little research integrated the influence of both shared book-reading and parental emotion beliefs on children’s emotion regulation abilities.
This study aims to integrate the influences of parental emotion beliefs and parent-child conversations during shared book-reading, to understand the interaction of these influences on preschoolers’ emotion regulation abilities. First, parents will be administered questionnaires to measure their beliefs about their own emotions, their beliefs about their children’s emotions, and their child’s emotion regulation skills. Then, during the study session, parents and their children will engage in a shared book-reading task and parent-child discourse will be analyzed by measuring the proportion of emotional and general utterances made by parents. Finally, a frustration task will be conducted with the children to assess their emotion regulation strategies when they experience negative emotions. Children will be shown a password-protected website and will be given the wrong password to elicit negative emotions. After 3 minutes, the experimenter will give them the correct password (procedure based on transparent box task by Goldsmith et. al, 1993). Children’s responses during this task will be coded into 3 categories – comforting behaviors, distracting behaviors and cognitive reappraisal. Instances of negative emotion displayed by the children will also be coded from their tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures.
The study has 3 hypotheses – 1) Parental emotion beliefs will be associated with children’s emotion regulation abilities, 2) Children whose parents have more emotional utterances during shared book-reading will use more adaptive emotion regulation strategies, 3) Parents who understand their own emotions better will have more emotional utterances during shared book-reading. To test these hypotheses, bivariate correlations will be calculated between the different variables. To assess which of the variables is a unique predictor of children’s emotion regulation abilities, multiple regression analyses will be carried out. Participants will be recruited from databases of past participants and through museum and preschool partners. We anticipate that data collection and analysis will be completed in time for the conference.
This study will highlight how the nature of conversations during shared book-reading may influence children’s emotion regulation strategies. It will not only help in understanding how such daily life activities affect children’s abilities to manage emotions but will also help in educating parents which may help in preventing future adverse outcomes for children.

Authors

• Arundhati Debnath, Villanova University
  Presenting Author

• Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Villanova University
  Non-Presenting Author