Maternal Self-Construal, Maternal Socialization of Emotions and Child Emotion Regulation in a Sample of Romanian Mother-Toddler Dyads.

Over the recent years, there is growing recognition of the social and cultural regulatory processes that act upon individual emotions. The adult-to-child social regulation of emotion is even more relevant, given the development of child self-regulatory abilities during early years. Although it is acknowledged that parental regulatory attempts to their children's emotional expressions are influenced by cultural models, relatively little is known about the specific relationship between parental cultural models and socialization practices that foster emotion self-regulation, particularly in the case of toddlers. Therefore, in the present study, our first aim was to examine, in a Romanian sample of mother-toddler dyads, the relationships between maternal cultural model of self and maternal regulatory attempts targeting toddlers' emotions during a delay of gratification task, while controlling for maternal perceptions of child individual characteristics, namely temperament. The second aim was to analyze, within the delay of gratification task, the relations between maternal regulatory attempts, child regulatory strategies and child affect expression, as the outcome of emotion regulation. Results showed that mothers scored higher for Independence as compared to Interdependence dimensions of self-construal. Also, the multidimensional analysis of self-construal revealed that Autonomy/Assertiveness scores were significantly higher than Relational Interdependent scores. Moreover, different dimensions of Independence predicted different maternal regulatory strategies employed during the delay of gratification task. This pattern of results suggests that maternal representations of an independent self, evidenced in our sample, are reflected in regulatory practices, aimed to develop primary control in the toddler. Moreover, our data revealed several significant associations between maternal regulatory strategies and child regulatory strategies expressed during the delay of gratification task. Finally, we demonstrated that child self-regulation mediated the relation between maternal regulatory attempts and child expression of affect during this task.

[Regulation of Positive and Negative Emotions as Mediator between Maternal Emotion Socialization and Child Problem Behavior]. / Regulation positiver und negativer Emotionen als Mediator zwischen Emotionssozialisation der Mutter und Problemverhalten des Kindes.

The present study investigated five to six year old children's ability to regulate negative and positive emotions in relation to psychosocial problem behavior (N=53). It was explored, whether mothers' supportive and nonsupportive strategies of emotion socialization influence children's problem behavior by shaping their emotion regulation ability. Mothers reported on children's emotion regulation and internalizing and externalizing problem behavior via questionnaire, and were interviewed about their preferences for socialization strategies in response to children's expression of negative affect. Results showed that children with more adaptive expression of adequate positive emotions had less internalizing behavior problems. When children showed more control of inadequate negative emotions, children were less internalizing as well as externalizing in their behavior. Furthermore, results indicated indirect relations of mothers' socialization strategies with children's problem behavior. Control of inadequate negative emotions mediated the link between non-supportive strategies on externalizing problem behavior. Results suggest that emotion regulatory processes should be part of interventions to reduce the development of problematic behavior in young children. Parents should be trained in dealing with children's emotions in a constructive way.

Emotion displays in media: a comparison between American, Romanian, and Turkish children's storybooks.

Children's books may provide an important resource of culturally appropriate emotions. This study investigates emotion displays in children's storybooks for preschoolers from Romania, Turkey, and the US in order to analyze cultural norms of emotions. We derived some hypotheses by referring to cross-cultural studies about emotion and emotion socialization. For such media analyses, the frequency rate of certain emotion displays can be seen as an indicator for the salience of the specific emotion. We expected that all children's storybooks would highlight dominantly positive emotions and that US children's storybooks would display negative powerful emotions (e.g., anger) more often and negative powerless emotions (e.g., sadness) less often than Turkish and Romanian storybooks. We also predicted that the positive and negative powerful emotion expressions would be more intense in the US storybooks compared to the other storybooks. Finally, we expected that social context (ingroup/outgroup) may affect the intensity emotion displays more in Turkish and Romanian storybooks compared to US storybooks. Illustrations in 30 popular children's storybooks (10 for each cultural group) were coded. Results mostly confirmed the hypotheses but also pointed to differences between Romanian and Turkish storybooks. Overall, the study supports the conclusion that culture-specific emotion norms are reflected in media to which young children are exposed.

Face it or hide it: parental socialization of reappraisal and response suppression.

Mastery of cognitive emotion regulation strategies is an important developmental task. This paper focuses on two strategies that occur from preschool age onwards (Stegge and Meerum Terwogt, 2007): reappraisal and response suppression. Parental socialization of these strategies was investigated in a sample of N = 219 parents and their children. Informed by the tripartite model of family impact on children's emotion regulation, direct relations of emotion socialization components (modeling and reactions to the child's negative emotions) and indirect relations of parental emotion-related beliefs (such as parental emotion regulation self-efficacy) were examined. Data on emotion socialization components and parental beliefs on emotion regulation were collected via self-report. Data on children's emotion regulation strategies were collected via parent report. Findings showed direct effects of parental modeling and parenting practices on children's emotion regulation strategies, with distinct socialization paths for reappraisal and response suppression. An indirect effect of parental emotion regulation self-efficacy on children's reappraisal was found. These associations were not moderated by parent sex. Findings highlight the importance of both socialization components and parental emotion-related beliefs for the socialization of cognitive emotion regulation strategies and suggest a domain-specific approach to the socialization of emotion regulation strategies.