Collaborative Research: A dynamic multidimensional examination of parental socialization of children's emotion understanding and social competence in middle childhood

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to examine the influence of mothers' knowledge of emotions, parenting style, and socializing behaviors on emotional understanding and social competence of their third grade children. Emotional understanding is defined as both recognition accuracy (correctly identifying emotions seen in others) and emotion knowledge (knowing what people feel in certain situations as well as the causes and consequences of those feeling states). A conceptual model will be tested in which mothers' beliefs about emotions; their parenting styles and their own understanding of emotions affect their children's emotional understanding as mediated through mother's socialization behaviors around emotions. The collaborative team of investigators explores 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). They will also examine how the multiple components of children's emotion understanding affect children's social skills and relationships with teachers and peers, and each of these associations will be studied within the contexts of race and class. This project is one of the first to examine children's emotion understanding comprehensively, dynamically, and within relationships; to fully explore the effects of mothers' parenting styles, emotion-related beliefs, and socialization behaviors on children's emotion understanding; to include maternal variables, children's emotion understanding, and children's social competence in school in one study; and to consider the effects of race and class on all of the above within a fully balanced design in which race and class are not confounded. This work will provide opportunities for research training at both UNC and North Carolina State, including participants from underrepresented groups in a sample well-balanced by ethnicity and SES. In addition, opportunities will created for students to carve out their own research projects (e.g., for Masters or doctoral theses) from the very rich data set that will emerge from this project. Importantly, the project represents the first inter-institutional collaboration between the Psychology Department at NCSU and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and the Center for Developmental Science at UNC-Chapel Hill; if it goes well, new cross-campus educational opportunities could emerge. Finally, the investigators are committed to disseminating their research findings.