The relations between 4 sources of family stress (marital dissatisfaction, home chaos, parental depressive symptoms, and job role dissatisfaction) and the emotion socialization practice of mothers' and fathers' responses to children's negative emotions were examined. Participants included 101 couples with 7-year-old children. Dyadic analyses were conducted using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model and relations were tested in terms of the spillover, crossover, and compensatory hypotheses. Results suggest that measures of family stress relate to supportive and nonsupportive parental responses, though many of these relations differ by parent gender. The results are discussed in terms of the 3 theoretical hypotheses, all of which are supported to some degree depending on the family stressor examined. Keywords emotion socialization; family stress; parental responses to children's negative emotions; parent genderCoping with a negative emotion, such as sadness, anger, or fear, is a more developmentally difficult task for children than coping with a positive emotion (Ramsden & Hubbard, 2002). Until children have learned how to cope with and regulate their negative feelings, it is important for parents to assist children in handling these experiences. In their responses to their children's negative emotions, parents are providing valuable information to their children about Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jackie A. Nelson, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402. janelso3@uncg.edu. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript J Fam Psychol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 October 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript appropriate emotional displays and successful coping strategies. Parent responses to children's negative emotions have been described as one of the most important methods of direct emotion socialization (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998).Parents vary in the ways they respond to negative emotions, and their responses can be described as either supportive or nonsupportive (Eisenberg et al., 1998;Fabes, Poulin, Eisenberg, & Madden-Derdich, 2002). Supportive responses by parents invite children to explore their feelings by encouraging the child to express emotions or helping the child understand and cope with an emotion-eliciting situation. Nonsupportive responses, such minimizing the child's emotional experience, punishing the child, or becoming distressed by the child's display, send messages to the child that the display of negative emotions is not appropriate or acceptable. Supportive parental responses to children's negative emotions have been found to be related to aspects of emotional and social competence including children's emotion understanding and friendship quality (McElwain, Halberstadt, & Volling, 2007). By contrast, parental nonsupportive or suppressive responses have been linked to stored negative affect in the child and disorgan...

SYNOPSIS Objective Mothers’ beliefs about their children’s negative emotions and their emotion socialization practices were examined. Design Sixty-five African American and 137 European American mothers of 5-year-old children reported their beliefs and typical responses to children’s negative emotions, and mothers’ emotion teaching practices were observed. Results African American mothers reported that the display of negative emotions was less acceptable than European American mothers, and African American mothers of boys perceived the most negative social consequences for the display of negative emotions. African American mothers reported fewer supportive responses to children’s negative emotions than European Americans and more nonsupportive responses to children’s anger. African American mothers of boys also reported more nonsupportive responses to submissive negative emotions than African American mothers of girls. However, no differences were found by ethnicity or child gender in observed teaching about emotions. Group differences in mothers’ responses to negative emotions were explained, in part, by mothers’ beliefs about emotions. Conclusions Differences in beliefs and practices may reflect African American mothers’ efforts to protect their children from discrimination.

The current study examined the moderating effect of children’s cardiac vagal suppression on the association between maternal socialization of negative emotions (supportive and non-supportive responses) and children’s emotion regulation behaviors. One hundred and ninety-seven 4-year-olds and their mothers participated. Mothers reported on their reactions to children’s negative emotions and children’s regulatory behaviors. Observed distraction, an adaptive self-regulatory strategy, and vagal suppression were assessed during a laboratory task designed to elicit frustration. Results indicated that children’s vagal suppression moderated the association between mothers’ non-supportive emotion socialization and children’s emotion regulation behaviors such that non-supportive reactions to negative emotions predicted lower observed distraction and lower reported emotion regulation behaviors when children displayed lower levels of vagal suppression. No interaction was found between supportive maternal emotion socialization and vagal suppression for children’s emotion regulation behaviors. Results suggest physiological regulation may serve as a buffer against non-supportive emotion socialization.

We examined mother-child cooperative behavior, children’s emotion regulation and executive function, as well as combinations of these factors, as predictors of moral reasoning in 89 10-year-old children. Dyadic cooperation was coded from videotaped observations of laboratory puzzle and speech tasks. Emotion regulation was derived from maternal report, and executive functioning was assessed with the Tower of London task. Moral reasoning was coded during mother-child conversations about morally ambiguous, peer-conflict situations. Two significant interactions indicated that children from more cooperative dyads who also had higher executive function skills had higher moral reasoning scores than other children, and children lower in both emotion regulation and executive function had lower moral reasoning scores than other children. The results contribute to the literature on the multiple and interactive levels of influence on moral reasoning in childhood.

Developmental precursors to children’s early understanding of gratitude were examined. A diverse group of 263 children were tested for emotion and mental state knowledge at ages 3 and 4, and their understanding of gratitude was measured at age 5. Children varied widely in their understanding of gratitude, but most understood some aspects of gratitude-eliciting situations. A model-building path analysis approach was used to examine longitudinal relations among early emotion and mental state knowledge and later understanding of gratitude. Children with a better early understanding of emotions and mental states understand more about gratitude. Mental state knowledge at age 4 mediated the relation between emotion knowledge at age 3 and gratitude understanding at age 5. The current study contributes to the scant literature on the early emergence of children’s understanding of gratitude.