The purpose of this project is to examine the influence of mothers' knowledge of emotions, parenting style, and socializing behaviors on emotional understanding and social competence of their third grade children. Emotional understanding is defined as both recognition accuracy (correctly identifying emotions seen in others) and emotion knowledge (knowing what people feel in certain situations as well as the causes and consequences of those feeling states). A conceptual model will be tested in which mothers' beliefs about emotions; their parenting styles and their own understanding of emotions affect their children's emotional understanding as mediated through mother's socialization behaviors around emotions. The collaborative team of investigators explores relationships between multiple components of emotion understanding (including accuracy regarding emotions people show on their faces, and knowledge about when and why people have certain feelings, and show or control their feelings). They will also examine how the multiple components of children's emotion understanding affect children's social skills and relationships with teachers and peers, and each of these associations will be studied within the contexts of race and class. This project is one of the first to examine children's emotion understanding comprehensively, dynamically, and within relationships; to fully explore the effects of mothers' parenting styles, emotion-related beliefs, and socialization behaviors on children's emotion understanding; to include maternal variables, children's emotion understanding, and children's social competence in school in one study; and to consider the effects of race and class on all of the above within a fully balanced design in which race and class are not confounded.
This work will provide opportunities for research training at both UNC and North Carolina State, including participants from underrepresented groups in a sample well-balanced by ethnicity and SES. In addition, opportunities will created for students to carve out their own research projects (e.g., for Masters or doctoral theses) from the very rich data set that will emerge from this project. Importantly, the project represents the first inter-institutional collaboration between the Psychology Department at NCSU and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and the Center for Developmental Science at UNC-Chapel Hill; if it goes well, new cross-campus educational opportunities could emerge. Finally, the investigators are committed to disseminating their research findings.
The major goals of our project were to examine a) the underlying components of children’s emotion understanding in middle childhood, b) the relations between mothers’ early parenting, beliefs about emotions, and emotion socialization strategies, and children’s understanding of emotions, and c) the associations between children’s understanding of emotions and social competence in school. Our project is an extension of the NSF-funded Durham Child Health and Development Study (DCHD), which followed children from infancy through 2nd grade. In our project, mothers and children from the DCHD study participated in a laboratory visit when the children were in 3rd grade. To account for attrition, we recruited an additional 75 families who matched the same demographic structure for ethnicity and SES as the DCHD families who had discontinued participation. The 203 mother-child dyad participants consisted of a racially and socio-economically balanced sample of largely urban families in central North Carolina. Mothers and children participated in a series of laboratory tasks designed to assess emotion recognition, emotion knowledge, emotion language, emotion interpretation, emotion biases, complexity of emotion understanding, empathy, and prosocial behavior. Mothers and children’s teachers also completed questionnaires related to children’s social skills, emotion regulation, and behavior problems. Our project advances scientific knowledge by investigating the interconnections between numerous parenting processes, children’s emotion understanding, and children’s social and emotional development in a unique sample that was racially and socio-economically balanced. We examined these associations during middle childhood, an understudied developmental period in emotion research, but nonetheless critical given parental and societal expectations regarding increased child autonomy and decreased dependence on adults for emotional functioning during this time. Initial important findings include, but are not limited to (a) the structure of children’s emotion understanding is multi-faceted and complex, (b) children’s empathic feelings do relate to their prosocial tendencies and behavior, (c) mothers’ and children’s emotion complexity in understanding emotions includes the ability to differentiate multiple emotions from each other, to identify how to know what one is feeling, and to know how to change one’s feeling when so desired, (d) mothers’ emotion complexity seems particularly related to children’s school relationships in the contexts in which families have less education or income, and (e) mothers’ beliefs about the value of positive emotion related to children’s self-reported feelings and expressions of pride, suggesting the value of parents’ emotion-related beliefs in inculcating children’s own beliefs and subsequent emotion-related experience. In addition, a novel innovative measure, the Increasingly Clear Emotions Task (ICE) was developed for this project and has since been administered to over 1,000 children participating in other research studies. The ICE task is a computer-based presentation of photos of ethnically-diverse adults’ emotion expressions, delivered in segments as the emotion is unfolding. Mother and child participants were asked to identify the emotion in different stages before it was fully revealed. Thus, emotions were more ambiguous in early segments allowing us to capture the accurate early detection of emotions, as well as potential emotional biases in participants’ responses. The vignettes we created for empathy and for emotion complexity, and the detailed coding manuals to assess them, are available to researchers as well. Broader impacts of our project include the extensive in-depth training of the next generation of researchers who will contribute to our scientific understanding of parenting processes and children’s social and emotional development. A diverse group of over 60 post-doctoral students, graduate students, and undergraduate students participated in the administration of this project by assisting with protocol development, participant recruitment, data collection, data processing, coding, analyses, and/or dissemination of research findings through conference presentations and scholarly publications. As we continue to examine the data from this project, our findings will help to unveil how emotion processes may be transgenerational in nature and the mechanisms by which these emotion skills may be conveyed from mother to child. In addition, our findings will help illuminate variations in mother and child emotional functioning that best support children’s adaptive social and emotional outcomes.
