Studies suggest that socialization of emotional expression plays a powerful role in the development of individual styles of emotional expressions. This study expands our understanding of the socialization forces on children's developing emotional expressiveness by using multiple measures of parental socialization norms, including a previously developed questionnaire and mothers' actual styles of overt expressiveness. Because emotional expressiveness is thought to reflect and direct internal emotional states as well as reflect socialization experiences, several measures of children's physiological arousal and organization will be obtained and used in conjunction with socialization data to predict children's overt expressiveness. Thus, this study tries to predict children's overt expressivity from parental socialization of emotional expression and children's own physiological arousal and organization. Mothers, preselected for their reported socialization of low or high emotional expressiveness on the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire which assesses socialization of affect, will read a story to their preschool child, and both mothers and children will be unobtrusively videotaped. Children's overt expressivity will also be videotaped as they experience a series of emotion-inducing stimuli. Baseline measures for autonomic arousal will be obtained while children sit quietly and watch a Sesame Street videotape. Besides informing about the development of children's styles of overt emotional expressivity these data will also further our understanding of the construct of expressivity, and further validate the questionnaire assessing socialization of affect.
