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.
Social skills training (SST) programs can be an effective means of improving children's social skills and behavior. However, significant time, financial, and opportunity barriers limit the number of children who can benefit from in-person SST programs. In this study, we conducted an initial evaluation of the efficacy of Zoo U, an interactive online game for elementary-age children that translates evidence-based social emotional learning strategies into tailored social problem-solving scenes in a virtual world. Children were randomly assigned to either treatment (n = 23) or wait-list control (n = 24) and were compared on parent-report of their social and behavioral adjustment, as well as self-report of social self-efficacy, social satisfaction, and social skill literacy. Following participation in the Zoo U game-based SST program, the treatment group showed enhanced social skills in the areas of impulse control, emotion regulation, and social initiation, as well as more adaptive social behavior compared to the control group. Children in the treatment group also reported significant improvements in their feelings of social self-efficacy and social satisfaction, as well as higher social literacy at post-intervention compared to children in the control condition. This study provides preliminary evidence that a game-based approach to SST can be an effective method for improving children's social skills and enhancing social knowledge, functioning, and self-confidence. Discussion focuses on the need for further investigation to establish the role that game-based SST can play in supporting children's social growth and wellbeing.
Objective-This study examined ethnicity (African American, European American, and Lumbee American Indian) and child gender as moderators of gender differences in parents' emotion socialization behaviors.Design-Mothers and fathers from two samples responded to questionnaires assessing self expressiveness in the family (N=196) or reactions to children's negative emotions (N=299).Results-Differences between mothers and fathers varied as a function of ethnicity. Mothers and fathers showed similar levels of negative expressiveness in European American and African American families, whereas fathers were more negatively expressive than mothers in Lumbee families. Mothers reported more supportive reactions than fathers among European Americans and Lumbees, but African American mothers and fathers reported nearly equal levels of supportive reactions. Parent gender x ethnicity interactions were further moderated by child gender. Mothers were generally more supportive of girls' negative emotions than fathers across all ethnicities. For boys, however, parent gender differences in supportive reactions to negative emotions varied by ethnicity. Mothers were more supportive than fathers among European American parents of boys, but mothers were less supportive than fathers among African American parents of boys.
Conclusions-Resultshighlight the contextualized nature of emotion socialization, and the need to consider ethnicity and child gender as influences on mothers' and fathers' gender-specific emotion socialization.
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