A theoretical model for affective social competence is described. Affective social competence (ASC) is comprised of three integrated and dynamic components: sending affective messages, receiving affective messages, and experiencing affect. Central and interconnected abilities within each component include awareness and identification of affect, working within a complex and constantly changing social context, and management and regulation. The dynamic integration of the components is emphasized and potential mediating factors are outlined. The model is placed within the context of previous research and theory related to affective social competence; how the model advances future research is also explicated for each component. Research with special populations of children is described to highlight the importance of affective social competence in social relationships and the promise of the ASC model for future research and practice.

The family appears to be an important setting for learning about emotions and how to express them within a social context. Because of the need for reliable and valid measures of emotional expressiveness in the family, the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire (SEFQ) is introduced and evaluated in four studies with 499 mothers and 362 fathers. Factor analyses indicate highly consistent patterns of loadings for a two-factor solution across the four studies. The resulting positive and negative scales are highly internally consistent and stable over time. Evidence of good convergent, discriminant, and construct validity was obtained, and a preliminary short form with good internal consistency and construct validity was also identified. Ideas for future research on marital and parent-child issues are suggested.Emotional expressiveness has long been of interest to scholars (e.g., Allport & Vernon, 1933; Darwin, 1872Darwin, /1965). However, it is only more recently that theorists have considered the family to be an important context in which individuals learn about emotions and emotional expressiveness. In particular, it is thought that children learn rules about what to feel (Hochsehild, 1979) and how to express those feelings (Saarni,

A questionnaire measuring family styles of emotional expression was developed and used in a study that assessed the effects of family socialization of emotional expression on individuals' own emotional expression as well as their nonverbal behavior and skill. Questionnaire development indicated accuracy in tapping emotional expression levels in the home. In the study, college-aged subjects and confederates filled out several questionnaires, were videotaped while discussing topics of emotional significance and while encoding scenes of affective content, and participated in a nonverbal judging task. The socialization hypothesis, that family expressiveness has a differential effect on individuals' nonverbal behavior and skill, was supported and refined. It appears that style of expression and skill in communication are influenced by the emotional expressiveness of the family environment.Most theorists agree that socialization is an important component in the degree and patterning of emotional expression (e.g., Buck, 1979;Ekman & Friesen, 1969;Izard, 1971;Jones, 1950Jones, , 1960. Most theorists would also agree that the socialization process itself, and the effects of socialization on an individual's emotional expression and interpersonal skills, is a matter of many influences, including family, peers, neighborhood, culture, and society.It seems that the family should be the primary agent for socializing emotional expression because it is in family situations that an individual must first attempt to communicate needs and desires. Indeed, the few studies on this topic report a positive relation between family socialization and individuals' resulting styles of emotional expression. Balswick and Avertt (1977), using college students' self-reports, found a strong relation between student and parental expressiveness. Also, Malatesta and Haviland (1982), using observational techniques, found significant commonalities in the expressiveness of mothers and their 3-and 6-month-old infants.Despite the paucity of research chronicling the socialization process, mention of family influence on individuals' expressive styles has been frequent in the nonverbal communication literature, especially as an explanation for differences in nonverbal communication skills. A relation between parental discipline and emotional expression was first proposed by Jones (1950, Portions of this article are based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to The Johns Hopkins University. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Judith A. Hall, Bert F. Green, and Bruce C. Milligan in all phases of that research; the support during that time from a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship; and the valuable comments of Judith A. Hall on the present article. I also wish to thank the many students, confederates, and experimenters who participated in the research, and Cynthia Hayes who especially assisted in collection and analysis of the data.

Mother-and father-reported reactions to children's negative emotions were examined as correlates of emotional understanding (Study 1, N = 55, 5-to 6-year-olds) and friendship quality (Study 2, N = 49, 3-to 5-year-olds). Mothers' and fathers' supportive reactions together contributed to greater child-friend coordinated play during a sharing task. Further, when one parent reported low support, greater support by the other parent was related to better understanding of emotions and less intense conflict with friends (for boys only). When one parent reported high support, however, greater support by the other parent was associated with less optimal functioning on these outcomes. Results partially support the notion that children benefit when parents differ in their reactions to children's emotions.How parents respond to their children's emotional displays, especially those involving negative affect, has important implications for children's socioemotional functioning (Dunsmore & Halberstadt, 1997;Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998;Gottman, Katz & Hooven, 1996;Parke, 1994). Parental reactions that are punitive or dismissing may impede children's ability to regulate physiological arousal (Gottman et al., 1996;Eisenberg, Fabes, & Murphy, 1996) and process information about emotional events (Gottman et al., 1996;Hoffman, 1983), and may also lead children to view emotions as threatening, avoid emotionally challenging situations, and ultimately miss opportunities to learn about and cope with negative emotions (Eisenberg et al., 1998). In contrast, parental responses to children's negative emotions that provide instrumental (e.g., problem-solving) or emotional (e.g., comforting) support are hypothesized to foster social and emotional competence through the child's openness to explore emotional events and meanings, the ability to regulate arousal, and focus and shift attention to emotional stimuli in appropriate ways (Eisenberg et al., 1998;Gottman et al., 1996).Studies of parental reactions to children's emotions have typically been conducted with mothers only, despite calls for greater attention to the larger family system (Cowan, 1996;Parke & McDowell, 1998) and suggestions in the literature that fathers may play a unique role in children's socioemotional development (Parke, 1994;Roberts & Strayer, 1987;Rohner & Correspondence concerning this manuscript may be addressed to the first author at the Department of Human and Community Development, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 904 W. Nevada Street, Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail: mcelwn@uiuc.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptChild Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2008 October 7. Published in final edited form as:Child Dev. 2007 ; 78(5): 1407-1425. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01074.x. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript Veneziano, 2001;Volling, McElwain, Notaro, & Herrera, 2002). When studies have included fathers, associations between parental reactions and child outcomes have been examined separately for...

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Children who are able to recognize others’ emotions are successful in a variety of socioemotional domains, yet we know little about how school-aged children's abilities develop, particularly in the family context. We hypothesized that children develop emotion recognition skill as a function of parents’ own emotion-related beliefs, behaviors, and skills. We examined parents’ beliefs about the value of emotion and guidance of children's emotion, parents’ emotion labeling and teaching behaviors, and parents’ skill in recognizing children's emotions in relation to their school-aged children's emotion recognition skills. Sixty-nine parent-child dyads completed questionnaires, participated in dyadic laboratory tasks, and identified their own emotions and emotions felt by the other participant from videotaped segments. Regression analyses indicate that parents’ beliefs, behaviors, and skills together account for 37% of the variance in child emotion recognition ability, even after controlling for parent and child expressive clarity. The findings suggest the importance of the family milieu in the development of children's emotion recognition skill in middle childhood, and add to accumulating evidence suggesting important age-related shifts in the relation between parental emotion socialization and child emotional development.

The goal of this review is to consider how culture impacts the socialization of emotion development in infancy, and infants’ and young children’s subsequent outcomes. First, we argue that parents’ socialization decisions are embedded within cultural structures, beliefs, and practices. Second, we identify five broad cultural frames (collectivism/individualism; power distance; children’s place in family and culture; ways children learn; and value of emotional experience and expression) that help to organize current and future research. For each frame, we discuss the impact on parents’ socialization practices and infants’ subsequent outcomes relating to emotion-related experience, expression, and understanding. We also generate testable hypotheses to further our understanding of the relationships between the five frames and emotion development in infancy.

Parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions comprise an important aspect of parental emotion socialization and may relate to children’s mental health and well-being. Thus, the goal of this study was to develop a multi-faceted questionnaire assessing parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions (PBACE). Central to our work was inclusion of multiple ethnic groups throughout the questionnaire development process, from initial item creation through assessment of measurement invariance and validity. Participants included 1080 African American, European American, and Lumbee American Indian parents of 4- to 10-year old children who completed the initial item pool for the PBACE. Exploratory factor analyses were conducted with 720 of these parents to identify factor structure and reduce items. Confirmatory factor analysis was then conducted with a holdout sample of 360 parents to evaluate model fit and assess measurement invariance across ethnicity and across parent gender. Finally, validity of the PBACE scales was assessed via correlations with measures of parental emotional expressivity and reactions to children’s emotions. The PBACE is comprised of 33 items in seven scales. All scales generally demonstrated measurement invariance across ethnic groups and parent gender, thereby allowing interpretations of differences across these ethnic groups and between mothers and fathers as true differences rather than by-products of measurement variance. Initial evidence of discriminant and construct validity for the scale interpretations was also obtained. Results suggest that the PBACE will be useful for researchers interested in emotion-related socialization processes in diverse ethnic groups and their impact on children’s socioemotional outcomes and well-being.