The importance of parents' beliefs about emotions as an aspect of parents' emotional socialization has been suggested by theoretical and empirical work in recent years. Specifically, it has been hypothesized that parents' beliefs about children's emotions influence parents' emotion socialization behaviors and children's emotion-related outcomes. To date, however, the parental emotional beliefs that have been studied have been few, broadly defined, and have been defined based on the responses of a homogenous participant sample, predominantly white middle-class mothers. The long-term goal of the researchers is to assess how parental beliefs about emotion and parents' emotion-related behaviors influence and are themselves influenced by children's emotional well-being and affective social competence. In the present research it is proposed to begin this process by: (1) developing a questionnaire for parents that assesses their beliefs about children's emotions, and in which ethnic diversity is central in questionnaire development, (2) assessing the factor structure and demonstrating psychometric reliability and validity of the questionnaire for both mothers and fathers of children aged 4- to 10-years, in three different ethnic groups, and (3) examining the relationships between parents' beliefs about children's emotions and parents' behavior while discussing family conflicts, and (4) assessing how parental beliefs about emotion, and parental behaviors during parent-child discussions of conflict, are associated with children's frequency and complexity of emotion talk during those discussions. Future work will then be directed toward a more comprehensive examination of the relationship between parental beliefs and behaviors regarding emotion and children's affective social competence, including children's experience and expression of emotion. ? ?
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| Halberstadt, Amy G; Dunsmore, Julie C; Bryant, Alfred et al. (2013) Development and validation of the Parents' Beliefs About Children's Emotions Questionnaire. Psychol Assess 25:1195-210 |
| Stelter, Rebecca L; Halberstadt, Amy G (2011) The Interplay Between Parental Beliefs about Children's Emotions and Parental Stress Impacts Children's Attachment Security. Infant Child Dev 20:272-287 |
| Dunsmore, Julie C; Her, Pa; Halberstadt, Amy G et al. (2009) Parents' Beliefs about Emotions and Children's Recognition of Parents' Emotions. J Nonverbal Behav 33:121-140 |
