Preschool Children's Understanding of Love

Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX

Investigators

Abstract

Young children's emotion understanding has consistently been found to be an important facet of children's social competence. Traditionally, however, assessments of emotion understanding are limited to addressing only four emotions: happy, sad, mad, and scared. Little is known about children's understanding of the emotion of love-an emotion widely held as significant for the formation and maintenance of relationships throughout life. The proposed study aims to explore preschoolers' understanding of love by addressing four specific components of love: affection, exclusiveness, companionship/kindness, and secrets/intimacy. We aim to address whether children's understanding of love is associated with social competence, mother- child synchrony, and maternal emotion framing, and how these associations may vary with age and gender. Sixty mothers and their preschool children will participate in two videotaped laboratory interactions: pretend play (used to assess synchrony) and a picture book reading task (used to assess maternal emotion framing). Children will respond to 16 stories representing each of the four components of love in peer relationships. Descriptive analyses will be computed to explore children's understanding of each of the four components of love. Bivariate correlations will be computed between children's love interview scores and child age, sex, children's social competence, mother-child synchrony, and maternal emotion framing. If significant associations are found, regression analyses will be conducted to examine how synchrony and emotion framing may interact in contributing to children's understanding of love and social competence. These findings will help provide a developmental framework for conceptualizing the development of young children's knowledge of the emotion of love.