Maternal reactions to children’s emotions

Maternal reactions to children’s emotions

Qingfang Song, M.S.
Doctoral Student, Human Development
Cornell University

Malinda J. Colwell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Child Development Program Director
Human Development and Family Studies
Texas Tech University

Abstract

Associations among maternal reactions to children’s emotional expressions, preschool children’s emotion understanding, and emotion regulation were examined (N = 24). Mothers completed a self-report measure of their reactions to their children’s emotions. Preschool children completed standard measures of emotion understanding and participated in a disappointment paradigm. The disappointment task was videotaped and later coded for children’s reactions to receiving a disappointing prize. Maternal minimization reactions were positively correlated with children’s emotion situation knowledge. The teacher-rated subscale of children’s inhibitory control was significantly correlated with maternal emotion-focused and problem-focused responses. Results are useful for advocating certain parenting practices to promote children’s emotional development.

Keywords: maternal reactions, emotion understanding, emotion regulation, preschoolers

Introduction

During the last twenty years, there has been a burgeoning research interest in children’s emotional development because of its close link to social competence (e.g., Denham 1986; Denham et al. 1990; Denham et al. 2003). Parents are the primary socializing agents contributing to the development of children’s emotional competence, and the way parents respond to children’s emotional displays is one important socialization practice. Although many studies have examined the association between parental reactions to children’s emotions and one aspect of emotional competence, such as children’s emotion understanding (e.g., Denham et al. 1994; Denham et al. 1997) or emotion regulation (e.g., Eisenberg and Fabes 1994; Eisenberg, Fabes, and Murphy 1996), none of them has included the three constructs together to investigate how parental contingent reactions to children’s emotions can influence children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation simultaneously.

Investigations of the relationship between parental reactions and preschoolers’ emotion understanding have shown that significant positive relations between maternal reactions and children’s emotion understanding exist (e.g., Denham et al. 1994; Denham et al. 1997), suggesting that maternal supportiveness may facilitate the development of emotion understanding. On the other hand, punitive responsiveness to some negative emotions experienced by children may reinforce children to express fewer of those emotions, decreasing their opportunities of reflection and corresponding understanding from such emotional experience (Denham et al. 1994).

Researchers focusing on emotion regulation also have provided empirical support for relationships between various parental reactions and children’s management of their own emotions (Eisenberg and Fabes 1994; Eisenberg, Fabes, and Murphy 1996). Parents with relatively harsh or less supportive reactions have children who are more likely to employ less constructive coping skills when they are experiencing negative emotions, while parents who reported more supportive reactions such as comforting or problem-focused reactions are more likely to have children who cope with emotions more constructively.

Although results from the two groups demonstrate the influences of parental reactions on preschoolers’ emotional development, there is no current study to investigate simultaneously the three constructs of (1) parental reactions, (2) emotion understanding, and (3) emotion regulation. Emotion understanding and emotion regulation are two main components of children’s emotional competence, with inextricable influences on each other. Emotion understanding is conceptualized as a more basic component than emotion regulation (Denham 1998), and children who understand more about emotions are more successful at modifying their emotional reactions to negative emotions, such as disappointment (Garner and Power 1996). The primary goal of the present study is to examine the relationship between maternal reaction patterns and children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation. It is hypothesized that children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation will be significantly associated. In addition, it is hypothesized that positive maternal reactions to children’s emotions will be positively associated with both children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation. Conversely, negative maternal reactions are expected to be negatively associated with children’s emotional competence.

Child characteristics also likely play a role in how parental emotional reactions are associated with children’s emotional competence. Child sex and age are significantly related to parental reactions (Garside and Klimes-Dougan 2002), children’s emotion understanding (Denham et al. 1990), and emotion regulation (Eisenberg et al. 1996). In addition, associations of parental reactions with children’s emotion understanding (Denham et al. 1994; Denham et al. 1997) and regulation of others’ distress (Eisenberg et al. 1996) differ as a result of child age and sex. Therefore, child age and sex will be included in this study as possible moderators between maternal emotional reactions and children’s emotional competence.

Methods

Participants
Twenty-four preschool children (fourteen boys, ten girls) enrolled at the Texas Tech University Child Development Research Center (CDRC), and their mothers participated in the study. The children ranged in age from 2 to 5 years old. Most mothers and children were from middle- and upper-middle-class families, based on the information of parents’ education, income, and occupation (Entwisle and Astone 1994).

Procedure
After the research proposal was approved by the university Institutional Review Board, parents were approached by a research assistant at the childcare center during pick-up and drop-off time. The research assistant explained the purpose and general procedure of the study, and asked the parents whether they would like to give permission for their family to participate. Parents who signed the consent form were given a Family Information Form to provide demographic information, and mothers in these families completed the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES; Fabes et al. 2002). Children completed the Emotion Understanding Interview (based on Denham 1986) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT; Dunn and Dunn 1981), and participated in an experimental disappointment paradigm (Garner and Power 1996) during their free play time at the childcare center. All interviews were administered by one of two graduate research assistants or a faculty member. Teachers completed the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ) (Goldsmith and Rothbart 1991) to rate children’s emotion regulation.

Measures
Maternal reactions to children’s emotional expressions were assessed by self-report on the CCNES (Fabes et al. 2002). Twelve typical situations in which children are likely to experience distress and negative affect were presented. Mothers rated the likelihood of six different responses to each situation, based on the Likert scale from 1 (very unlikely) to 7 (very likely). The six different types of responses were (1) parental distress reactions, (2) punitive responses, (3) minimization response, (4) expressive encouragement, (5) emotion-focused responses, and (6) problem-focused responses. Total scores were summed within each response type. The alpha coefficients for the same type of responses across the 12 situations ranged from .69 to .89, which suggests adequate reliability.

Because children’s receptive vocabulary can affect their performance in the emotion understanding interview, the PPVT (Dunn and Dunn 1981) was used to assess children’s receptive verbal ability. During the interview, children were presented with a series of pages with four line-drawing pictures representing various items. Children were asked to point to one of four pictures upon a research assistant’s request of “Can you show me ?” Children got “1” for each correct answer and “0” for each incorrect answer. The raw score for the sum of all the answers and its z-score within each classroom were used to index children’s receptive vocabulary.

Children participated in the Emotion Understanding Interview (EUI) based on previous work (Denham 1986) which included two tasks to assess children’s ability to identify emotional expressions and their knowledge of emotional situations. For emotion labeling, children were asked to label the facial expressions on photographs of a female adult’s face depicting happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Four-line drawing pictures of a same-sex child’s happy, sad, angry, and fearful faces also were presented for children to label. Next, the four drawings were placed together, and children were asked to point out the correct faces according to interviewers’ requests of “show me the [happy/sad/angry/scared] face.” All of their answers were recorded. Children got “1” either for each correct answer or a correct identification and “0” for an incorrect response. The expressions on the faces have already been validated with adults in previous studies. Happy, sad, and angry faces were correctly identified by 85 percent to 95 percent of the adults, while 65 percent of the adults can correctly identify the fearful face (Denham et al. 1994).

In the emotion situation knowledge task, 16 unequivocal emotional situations about a child named Pat were read to children. Children then were asked to tell about how Pat would feel in every situation. Children either pointed to line-drawing pictures depicting four different facial expressions or by verbally naming the emotions. For each story, children scored “2” if they gave the correct emotion, “1” if they gave an emotion of the correct valence (e.g., the story depicts anger and the child says sad), and “0” if the answer was incorrect and of a different valence (e.g., the story depicts anger and the child says happy). The scores of all 16 stories for each child were averaged to represent each child’s emotion situation knowledge. Considering the significant correlation between children’s emotion labeling and emotion situation knowledge (r = .47, p < .05), emotion labeling and emotion situation knowledge were combined to form the composite of children’s emotion understanding.

Children’s emotion regulation was assessed through two measurements, the teacher-rated Child Behavior Questionnaire CBQ (Goldsmith and Rothbart 1991) and observations of children’s expressive control in a disappointment paradigm. The head teacher in the classroom rated children’s behavior within the classroom on the CBQ. Based on the rating scale from “1” (extremely untrue of child) to “7” (extremely true of child), the teacher rated how “true” it is that the child engages in a variety of certain behaviors. Items related to the subscales of soothability (e.g., “calms down quickly following an exciting event”) and inhibitory control (e.g., “gets angry more easily than most children of his age”) were used to represent aspects of children’s emotion regulation. Because the two subscales were correlated (r = -.64, p < .01), they were combined to be a composite of children’s emotion regulation.

The disappointment paradigm was embedded in the process of EUI. Before the EUI, children ranked five small toys from most liked to least liked. After the emotion labeling task, children were given their favorite toy. After the emotion situation knowledge task, children were given the least-liked present in order to elicit disappointment. Each child’s facial emotional reactions and verbal statements within the first 60 seconds after he or she had visual contact with the “disappointing prize” were videotaped and later coded as negative (“1”), neutral (“2”), or positive (“3”). Indicators such as frowning and downturned lips were coded as negative expressions, and indicators such as raised eyebrows and smiles were coded as positive expressions. Children’s verbal statements were coded as negative affirmations (“I don’t want this,” “I hate that”), neutral affirmations (“Okay”), or positive affirmations (“Thank you”). Two graduate students coded the videotape separately. The correlations between the two coders range from .77 to .94.

Statistical analysis
First, bivariate correlations between maternal reactions to children’s emotional expressions, children’s emotion understanding, and their emotion regulation were calculated. Because there were no significant correlations between children’s receptive vocabulary and aspects of emotion understanding, receptive vocabulary was not controlled when calculating correlations of children’s emotion understanding with other variables. Second, correlations between maternal reactions, children’s emotion understanding, and emotion regulation were computed separately for boys and girls. Third, the partial correlations between maternal reactions, children’s emotion understanding, and emotion regulation were calculated with age controlled. The partial correlations with age controlled were calculated for the whole sample, and separately for boys and girls.

Results

Statistical analysis
First, bivariate correlations between maternal reactions to children’s emotional expressions, children’s emotion understanding, and their emotion regulation were calculated. Because there were no significant correlations between children’s receptive vocabulary and aspects of emotion understanding, receptive vocabulary was not controlled when calculating correlations of children’s emotion understanding with other variables. Second, correlations between maternal reactions, children’s emotion understanding, and emotion regulation were computed separately for boys and girls. Third, the partial correlations between maternal reactions, children’s emotion understanding, and emotion regulation were calculated with age controlled. The partial correlations with age controlled were calculated for the whole sample, and separately for boys and girls.

Maternal reactions and children’s emotion understanding
There was only one significant correlation between maternal reactions and aspects of children’s emotion understanding. Specifically, maternal minimization reactions were positively correlated with children’s emotion situation knowledge (r = .45, p < .05). The associations between maternal reactions and children’s emotion understanding did not differ as a result of child sex.

With age controlled, maternal emotion-focused reactions were negatively correlated with children’s emotion understanding (r = -.95, p < .01). There also was a trend that maternal emotion-focused reactions were negatively correlated with children’s emotion labeling (r = -.85, p < .10), and maternal minimization reactions were correlated with emotion situation knowledge (r =.83, p < .10). When age was controlled for boys, only the association between maternal punitive reactions and emotion labeling was significant (r =.99, p < .05). No significant associations were found for girls with age controlled.

Maternal reactions and children’s emotion regulation
Mothers with emotion-focused reactions and problem-focused reactions had children lower in inhibitory control (r = -.63 and -.62, p < .01, respectively). Also, there was a trend that maternal punitive reactions were correlated with inhibitory control (r = .41, p = .06), and that maternal emotion-focused reactions were correlated with soothability (r = .38, p = .06). In addition, a trend between maternal expressive encouragement and children’s facial rating in the disappointment paradigm was found (r = -.38, p = .06).

Different associations between maternal reactions and children’s emotion regulation were found for boys and girls. For boys, there were significant negative correlations of inhibitory control with maternal emotion-focused reactions and problem-focused reactions (see Table 1). On the other hand, punitive reactions constitute the only type of maternal reactions to have a significant correlation with aspects of emotion regulation for girls. Specifically, maternal punitive reactions were correlated with inhibitory control. There also was a trend that maternal emotion-focused reactions were correlated with inhibitory control.

Age differences existed for the constructs of maternal reactions, children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation. Specifically, maternal expressive encouragement was negatively correlated with child age (r = -.39, p < .05). Moreover, older children scored higher in emotion labeling (r = .56, p < .01), emotion situation knowledge (r = .49, p < .05), overall emotion understanding (r = .61, p < .01), and teacher-rated emotion regulation (r = .46, p < .05). Because of these age differences, age was controlled as a moderator of associations among those constructs. When age was controlled, significant correlations between inhibitory control and both maternal distress (r =.88, p < .05) and maternal punitive reactions (r =.98, p < .01) were found in the whole sample. When age was controlled for boys, mothers who had problem-focused reactions had boys higher on soothability (r =.99, p< .05), while mothers who had punitive reactions had boys scoring higher on emotion regulation (r =.99, p < .05). No significant correlations were found for girls, when age was controlled.

Children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation
There were no significant correlations between aspects of children’s emotion understanding and teacher-rated emotion regulation. No significant correlations were found between emotion understanding and facial or verbal ratings of children’s regulation in the disappointment paradigm. When examined separately, there was a trend that boys’ emotion situation knowledge was correlated with soothability (r =.53, p < .10). Girls’ emotion understanding was not significantly correlated with any aspect of emotion regulation.

With age controlled, a significant correlation between emotion situation knowledge and children’s verbal rating when receiving the disappointing present was found (r =.92, p < .05). Children with more emotion situation knowledge used more positive verbal expressions, even when they were disappointed to get the disliked present. When age was controlled for boys and girls, there was only a trend found between boys’ emotion understanding and emotion regulation. That is, boys’ emotion labeling was associated with their emotion regulation.

Table 1. Correlations between maternal reactions and emotion regulation (inhibitory control) for boys and girls

[Table 1 Summary: This table shows the correlations between the three types of maternal reactions (emotion-focused reactions, problem-focused reactions, and punitive reactions) and emotion regulation. The correlations are reported separately for boys and girls. Maternal emotion-focused reactions are negatively associated with boys’ inhibitory control (r = -.66, p < .05) and marginally negatively associated with girls’ inhibitory control (r = -.60, p < .06). Maternal problem-focused reactions are negatively associated with boys’ inhibitory control (r = -.72, p < .05) and not significantly associated with girls’ inhibitory control. Maternal punitive reactions are positively associated with girls’ inhibitory control, (r = .64, p < .05), but not significantly associated with boys’ inhibitory control.]

Discussion

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the associations between maternal reactions to children’s emotional expressions and two specific aspects of children’s emotional competence: emotion understanding and emotion regulation. Before this study, none has systematically included the three constructs together and simultaneously examined how maternal reactions to children’s emotional expressions are associated with children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation.

There are several important findings from the study that may enrich our understanding of the relationship between maternal reactions and children’s emotion understanding. Maternal minimization was positively correlated with children’s emotion situation knowledge, which was not hypothesized. One possible explanation may be that maternal minimization operates differently than previously thought. Maternal minimization in the study was assessed through the CCNES (Fabes et al. 2002), capturing the degree to which parents minimize the seriousness of the situation or devalue the child’s problem or distressed reaction (e.g., “Tell my child that he/she is overreacting”). But the measurement here only assessed the behavioral aspect of maternal reactions, rather than the emotional aspect. As Denham and colleagues (1994) suggest, maternal happiness following children’s emotional expression was positively correlated with children’s emotion situation knowledge. So maternal minimization accompanied with positive-valence emotion may still be considered to be supportive and beneficial to children’s emotion understanding. Given that the majority of participants are from middle class families, maternal minimization as assessed in the study may capture a kind of supportive parenting and these mothers may tend to mitigate their harsh reactions in a positive way. Comparatively, due to working stress or challenging living environment, parents from low socioeconomic status (SES) families may tend to use more harsh reactions and may be less likely to mitigate expression of their harsh reactions.

Different from studies that focused on older children to examine the relationship between maternal reactions and children’s emotional competence (e.g., Eisenberg et al. 1994, Eisenberg et al. 1996), the study recruited a sample of young preschoolers. Therefore, the developmental stages of emotional competence should be noted. Due to the development of motor and cognitive skills, preschool is a period in which children can quickly acquire emotion knowledge and other emotion competencies (Denham 1998). During such a period, preschoolers have not crystallized their knowledge about emotional situations, so many kinds of responses from mothers may provide information to help children accumulate emotion understanding. Such a proposition was somewhat supported by the decreased significance level in the correlation between maternal minimization and children’s emotion situation knowledge after age was controlled. This suggests that the positive contribution from maternal minimization to children’s emotion understanding may be weakened when children grow up and formalize their emotion knowledge.

The study also is important to corroborate the significant associations between maternal reactions and children’s emotion regulation. On one hand, high quality maternal reactions, including emotion-focused and problem-focused reactions, were both associated with lower scores on the scale of children’s inhibitory control. Because the items on the inhibitory control scale, such as “gets overly excited” and “sometimes gets almost out of control,” reflect children’s lack of control and regulation over emotional arousal, the negative correlations suggest that mothers who employ high quality reactions have children who are more competent in emotion regulation. On the other hand, when age was controlled, low quality maternal reactions, specifically, maternal distress and punitive reactions, were associated with children’s low competence in inhibitory control. The results are consistent with previous studies (Eisenberg and Fabes 1994; Eisenberg, Fabes, and Murphy 1996), which suggest the beneficial socialization effects of high quality maternal reactions (and deleterious socialization effects of low quality maternal reactions) on children’s emotion regulation.

Unexpectedly, there was not a significant correlation between children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation. One possible explanation for this lack of association may be the small sample size, which makes it more difficult to find significant associations. It is possible that a significant and meaningful association between children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation can be obtained in a larger sample, according to the theoretical proposition that aspects of emotional competence work in an integrated and independent way (Denham 1998). Another possibility is that this association was not found due to the developmental stage of the children in the sample. It is conceivable that because young preschoolers are at the beginning developmental stages of children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation, these constructs are not yet developed to the point where they are related. Perhaps as children get older, what they understand about emotions is more closely related to how they control their emotions because their conceptualization of emotions solidifies as they have more experience with emotions. Therefore, future studies with children from the preschool years through the early elementary years might help discern the developmental progression of emotion understanding, emotion regulation, and the relationship between the two.

When child age was controlled, children’s emotion situation knowledge was significantly correlated with the verbal expressions for getting a disappointing present, which is consistent with Garner et al. (1996). Children who acquire more emotion situation knowledge may know more about socially appropriate emotions in certain situations. In the disappointment paradigm, those children may know that saying something positive to show their politeness or happiness is appropriate when receiving a present, even if the present is not satisfying. Thus, they were more likely to successfully cope with disappointment, which was evidenced by the positive verbal expressions such as “thank you” and “I’d like to take it home.” The current study was among one of the few studies (e.g., Garner et al. 1996) which demonstrated significant associations between some aspects of children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation.

The correlation between children’s emotion situation knowledge and their verbal expressions in the regulation of disappointment was significant when age was controlled. This result suggests that it is important to consider child age in understanding the association between children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation. Differences in the association between emotion understanding and emotion regulation as a function of child sex also were found. Sex differences may originate from different parenting practices used with boys and girls. Compared to girls, boys are more likely to get punitive reactions from parents and significant others when they express negative emotions. Such practice is consistent with the social norms that boys shouldn’t display negative emotions as often as girls. Especially when boys become upset or scared, their mothers will adopt punitive reactions to eliminate such expressions (Garside and Klimes-Dougan 2002). When exposed to a higher level of punitive reactions across many situations, boys may have the expectation of getting punitive reactions (Grusec and Goodnow 1994) and be less sensitive to this kind of punitive reaction. Therefore, they are less likely to be socialized by maternal punitive reactions, in terms of emotion regulation. On the other hand, girls are very sensitive to comparatively low occurrence of punitive reactions, and tend to get the deleterious effects of maternal punitive reactions on their emotion regulation.

Study limitations
There are several caveats to be considered when interpreting the results of the current study. First of all, the study recruited a relatively small and homogeneous sample, which may contribute to the low number of significant associations found between constructs. Second, maternal reactions to children’s emotional expression are based on the self-report measure. Observations that assess the emotional aspect of maternal reactions in specific contexts, together with self-reported CCNES, are suggested for future studies. Third, the three-value coding schema of the disappointment paradigm was relatively simple, which may not be sensitive enough to capture the differences in children’s emotion regulation. Fourth, only maternal reactions to children’s emotional expressions were included in the study. Reactions from fathers, siblings, and peers who also can be important socialization agent for children’s emotional development (e.g., Denham et al. 1997; Eisenberg et al. 1996; Dunn and Hughes 1988; Youngblade and Dunn 1995) should be examined in the future. Finally, all the analyses used in the study are correlational and not sufficient to explain or predict causality.

Implications for research and practice
Despite these limitations, the present study is still noteworthy because it demonstrates the mutual relationships between maternal reactions, children’s emotion understanding, and emotion regulation, as well as how sex and age are associated with those relationships. The study has attempted to incorporate the two distinct research groups and found unique correlations of maternal reactions with children’s emotion understanding. Although there was only one significant correlation between children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation in the disappointment paradigm, the study is still one of the few that successfully indicated the interrelatedness of children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation. In all, the results of this study suggest it is advantageous for future research to investigate the socialization of children’s emotional development and to further clarify how different aspects of children’s emotional competence are associated with their overall emotional development.

The study could be informative to parenting practices, in terms of the importance of various maternal reactions in children’s emotional development. Children’s experience and expressions of negative emotions is a common situation for parents, and results of this study are helpful in guiding parenting education. Certain kinds of maternal reactions, such as emotion-focused and problem-focused reactions, were demonstrated to facilitate children’s emotion regulation. Therefore, parents should be educated about the benefits and specific examples of supportive practices when children express negative emotions. For example, when children express sadness, parents can provide comforting behaviors (e.g., hugging them, listening to their concerns) to help young children overcome their sadness. In addition, parents could help children to find and relieve the causes of children’s sadness. On the other hand, parents should be educated to use less distress and punitive reactions, which were suggested to be deleterious for children’s emotional development. Parent educators could inform parents that responding to their children’s negative emotions by dismissing those emotions (e.g., “Stop being sad. You don’t have anything to be sad about.”) or being punitive (e.g., “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll spank you.” ) may not facilitate (and may even harm) children’s ability to cope with negative emotions.

Helping parents learn these adaptive responses to their children’s emotion is important because parents’ own emotional competence likely influences their natural reactions as they respond to their children’s emotions. For instance, being punitive and showing distress may be natural reactions for some parents, given their own socialization experiences. In order to address the needs of these parents, practitioners should provide active interventions to help parents be aware of their own emotional reactions and how to more supportively respond to their children’s emotions. One strategy could be to encourage parents to “cool off” three seconds before reacting to children’s negative emotions. This strategy, along with providing parents with options of supportive responses, will allow parents to respond in a more calm and supportive way to their children’s emotions.

Parents also should be informed of the different impact of parental reactions on boys and girls. Moreover, the influence of certain maternal reactions on children’s emotion understanding could differ, depending on child age. Specifically, parents should be aware that maternal minimization reactions could be one kind of parenting practice facilitating young children’s emotion understanding and may not be beneficial for older children. Raising parents’ awareness of different socialization practices for children of different ages gives parents tools to respond to their children not just at one developmental stage, but across development.

Overall, one of the key messages for practitioners to share with parents is that they play an important role in their children’s emotional development. The findings from this study show that the way parents respond to their children’s emotions is associated with children’s understanding and regulation of emotions. Providing parents with healthy options for emotional responsiveness will help parents develop a clearer understanding of their own emotions, as well as those of their children. This expanded understanding will enrich the parent-child relationship and will lead to more rewarding interactions for parents and their children.

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Cite this article

Qingfang Song and Malinda J. Colwell. 2008. Maternal reactions to children’s emotions. The Forum for Family and Consumer Issues, 13 (2).

On-line: http://ncsu.edu/ffci/publications/2008/v13-n2-2008-summer-fall/index-v13-n2-summer-2008.php

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