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CURRENT PROJECTS
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Children' emotion understanding: CUED IN Study
Although emotion understanding is a central skill for children’s interpersonal and academic success, and parents are important agents of children’s emotion socialization, few studies have considered mothers’ emotion-related socialization beliefs, parenting styles, or socialization behaviors as predictors of children’s emotion understanding abilities beyond early childhood. That is our goal in a two-year study, funding by the National Science Foundation. In this study, we will first explore relationships between multiple components of emotion understanding (including accuracy regarding emotions people show on their faces, and knowledge about when and why people have certain feelings and show or control their feelings). Dynamic measurement during middle childhood is particularly important because, in real life, adults and older children tend to only partially express, or even mask, their emotions. Our second goal is to examine direct and mediated contributions to children’s emotion understanding made by mothers’ parenting styles and beliefs about emotions, and their emotion socialization behaviors, including discussion of emotion with children and reactions to children’s negative feelings. Third, we will examine how the multiple components of children’s emotion understanding affect children’s social skills and relationships with teachers and peers. Finally, all these associations will be studied within the contexts of race and class.
One challenge to the study of children’s socio-emotional development has been to synthesize the myriad competencies of importance to children’s wellbeing. However, a recent transactional model now brings together the many skills and processes involved in “affective social competence” (ASC) into one coherent, testable whole (Halberstadt, Denham, & Dunsmore, 2001). In brief, the ASC model proposes that children develop emotional skills in three broad domains: sending (“the efficacious communication of one’s own affect”), receiving (“the successful interpretation and response to others’ affective communications”), and experiencing (“the awareness, acceptance, and management of one’s own affect”; Halberstadt, et al., 2001, p. 80). Our work in the lab is, in general, influenced by this conceptualization of affective social competence. Our task now is to translate this model into empirical action, and current granting efforts are directed toward that goal.
Parents’ beliefs and behaviors about children’s emotions
Parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions are thought to be important mechanisms that inform parents’ childrearing behaviors, and subsequently impact children’s socio-emotional competence. For example, Dix (1991; 1992; 1993) hypothesized that parents’ attributions about their children influence their emotional reactions toward them, and subsequently, how they socialize their children. Dunsmore and Halberstadt (1997) proposed that parents’ emotionally expressive behavior and beliefs about emotions work together to help children create self- and world-schemas. Gottman, et al. (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996, 1997; Katz, Wilson, & Gottman, 1999) similarly proposed that parents’ beliefs and behaviors regarding emotion, that is, their “meta-emotion theories and coaching,” affect important life outcomes for children. Further, parental awareness and coaching of emotions are related to more positive and less negative peer play in preschool-aged children (Katz & Windecker-Nelson, 2004).
Our recent work has focused on testing some of the propositions regarding parental beliefs and their associations with children’s behavior. In one study, we assessed linkages between parental beliefs about the value of emotion and parental behaviors, such as parents’ sharing of their own emotional experiences and discussing emotional topics with their children (Halberstadt, Thompson, Parker, & Dunsmore, 2008). And we also examined the linkages between parental beliefs and behaviors with the number of different and distinct kinds of coping strategies children were able to generate, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In this study we found that parental beliefs about the value of emotion were related to how parents discussed the terrorist attacks and expressed their own feelings with their children. Parental beliefs about emotion as valuable and as dangerous were both directly related to children’s coping two months after the attacks. These two variables further predicted parents’ emotion-related behavior and children’s engagement in a conversation about the attacks one year later.
These results as well as studies emerging from Julie Dunsmore’s lab at Virginia Tech suggest that parental beliefs may well be a powerful predictor of both parental behavior and children’s outcomes (e.g., Dunsmore, Her, Halberstadt, & Rivera, in press). We have several other studies that are ongoing in the Family, Affect, Beliefs, and Behaviors Lab at NC State, and several more that are proposed. In brief, our methodologies include: assessing parents’ and children’s evaluations of other people’s behavior in emotion-related interactions, assessing people’s responses in reaction time tasks, and observing parents’ and children’s interactions with each other in a variety of emotion- activating situations.
Three other studies deserve mention: We have found the field lacking in ways to adequately measure all the beliefs that we consider important. Thus, we have devoted considerable effort to developing a theoretically –based measure of parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions. First, we turned to parents themselves, and listened and learned from them through focus groups. Because we are committed to creating measures that resonate for diverse populations of parents, and based on data suggesting the importance of culture when considering beliefs about emotion (e.g., Tan & Cole, 2005), we decided to learn from both mothers and fathers from three ethnicities in the United States (African-American, European- American, and Lumbee Native American). We were both honored by these parents’ contributions to our understanding of their beliefs and amazed by the rich and vivid data emerging from these meetings. This qualitative work is now under review (Parker et al., 2008).
t seems that some people are just angry people; they get mad frequently regardless of the target. So does that mean that family members have a particular style in how they express anger toward other family members? From the social constructivist viewpoint, anger is constructed within relationships (Averill, 1982), not within individuals. Family members pass along the “rules” of emotion expression through socialization and emotion can even take on a life of its own and be “contagious”. So, is anger “trait” or “state”? We propose that (1) some people have a particular style in how they get angry in the family, regardless of who their anger is directed toward; (2) some people just have a way of eliciting anger from all the other family members; and (3) some people seem to have a relationship with one other person in the family in which their anger is different when dealing with that one person.
Analyses using the Social Relations Model (Kashy & Kenny, 1990) revealed actor effects (a general disposition to express anger in a particular way regardless of who in the family one is expressing anger towards), partner effects (a general disposition to elicit anger from others that is independent of family members’ general disposition to express anger), and relationship effects (significant adjustments being made between the dyads independently of each person’s general disposition of expressing or eliciting anger). Evidence supports our hypotheses, that anger is both trait and state in the context of the family (Beale, Halberstadt, Parker, & Craig, 2008).The Social Construction of Gender
Language involves learning both the specific language itself and the rules and conventions of the culture. Parents make many choices in how they talk to children; as they do so, they teach children (inadvertently or consciously) a variety of cultural rules. If language highlights the importance of gender, then we would expect children to construct schemas reflecting the importance of gender (Turiel, 1983; Vygotsky, 1962). Using two separate data sets of parent-child and child-child conversations, we documented the frequency of gendered speech and, additionally, the specific types of messages that children hear from family members and that they communicate themselves to others. In the first data set, we have found clear evidence that mothers communicate different messages by gender, even with children as young as four years old; we are currently analyzing the second data set for the messages being communicated by parents to children, children to parents, and children to their friends. These investigations support the claim that parents construct gendered behavior and values in children via the linguistic messages they convey, and children also bring their own gendered ideas to the table as well (Halberstadt, Thompson, & Craig, 2008).
Our newest work concerns how children’s understanding of emotion and gender may be shaped by picture books. Thus, we are testing how similarly or differently boys and girls, and women and men are portrayed in picture books with regard to visual and verbal expressiveness, and across age. Finding that females and males are portrayed as having different emotional lives may suggest an additional socialization contribution above and beyond the existing studies that report differential parental socialization of emotion by children’s gender (Craig & Halberstadt, 2008).Emotion Experience and Expression in collectivist cultures
As may be inferred from the projects above, we are very interested in how culture shapes emotional experience and expression. First, we examined emotional experience of individuals particularly Buddhists in Sri Lanka culture. Our aim was to explore how individuals recognize basic and some secondary emotions and their emotional experience of Buddhists in Sri Lankan culture and emotional expressions in various relationships such as with one’s parents, siblings, spouse, one’s own children, friends etc (Dissanayake, Halberstadt, & Kalat, 2008).
Next, we are interested in examining the relationship between emotion differentiation and interpersonal relations of individuals live in South Asian collectivist culture. Additionally, we focus on interpersonal relationship quality and individuals’ feeling about their lives. Moreover, we intend to examine the impact of beliefs about emotions emotion differentiation, interpersonal relations, and individuals’ feeling about their lives (Dissanayake, Halberstadt, & Kalat 2008).
