Preschoolers' Emotional Control in the Disappointment Paradigm and Its Relation to Temperament, Emotional Knowledge, and Family Expressiveness

Abstract

The present research evaluated a conceptual model that links temperament, emotional knowledge, and family expressiveness to preschoolers' emotion regulation ability. The emotional understanding of 82 preschoolers was assessed with 2 separate tasks. After the second emotional knowledge task, the children were presented a "disappointing" prize, and their facial displays of positive and negative affect were recorded. The children and their mothers also participated in a game designed to elicit maternal expressive behavior. Mothers provided information about the preschoolers' temperament and about the frequency of positive and negative affect expressed within their families. Results indicated that children's positive displays when presented the "disappointing" prize were inversely related to the temperamental dimension of emotional intensity and positively associated with children's understanding of emotion. Maternal reports of sadness within the family were inversely related to children's positive affective displays. Children's negative emotional displays in the disappointment situation were inversely related to observed maternal positive emotion. The findings from this study give greater specification to the unique and joint contributions of temperament, emotional knowledge, and family expressiveness in predicting preschoolers' expressive control of emotion.

Relations Among Teachers’ Emotion Socialization Beliefs and Practices and Preschoolers’ Emotional Competence

“…Given that the variance in the children’s scores in the current study was primarily due to factors within rather than between the classrooms, and given that past research has already found strong associations with parental emotion socialization practices and children’s emotional competence (Denham & Grout, 1992; Denham & Kochanoff, 2002; Denham et al, 1997; Denham et al, 1994; Fabes et al, 2002; Garner et al, 1994; Garner & Power, 1996; Garner et al, 1997), it would have been informative to know what kinds of emotion socialization strategies were being employed in the children’s home environments.…”

“…For example, research has shown that children’s skill at theory of mind tasks (Harwood & Farrar, 2006) and temperamental characteristics, such as dispositional emotional intensity (Garner & Power, 1996) and fearfulness (van der Mark, van Ijzendoorn, & Bakermans-Kranenberg, 2002), are associated with their emotional competence. Furthermore, children’s temperamental characteristics have been found to interact with emotional support in predicting academic outcomes (Curby, Rudasill, Edwards, & Perez-Edgar, 2011), and to influence mothers’ socialization behaviors (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1994).…”

The Role of the Family Context in the Development of Emotion Regulation

“…Of these few, findings do suggest a link between this component of the family context and children's ER. For example, Garner and Power (1996) found that negative maternal expressiveness was related to lower levels of children's expressed negative emotions during a disappointment task. In a study conducted by Eisenberg, Gershoff, et al.…”

Maternal Expressive Style and Children's Emotional Development

“…Generally, parents who display a lot of positivity have children who are also positive in their expressiveness (Camras et al ., ; Cassidy, Parke, Butkovsy, & Braungart, ; Isley, O'Neil, Clatfelter, & Parke, ) Results are more complex for parents' expression of negative emotion. Mothers' expression of negative emotion has been associated with less positive expression by children in one study (Garner & Power, ), and more positive expression in another (Cassidy et al ., ). It has also been suggested that mothers and children tend to display similar amounts of negative emotion during play, whereas father–child dyads tend to display dissimilar amounts (Isley et al ., ).…”