Amy G. Halberstadt - US grants

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The importance of parents' beliefs about emotions as an aspect of parents' emotional socialization has been suggested by theoretical and empirical work in recent years. Specifically, it has been hypothesized that parents' beliefs about children's emotions influence parents' emotion socialization behaviors and children's emotion-related outcomes. To date, however, the parental emotional beliefs that have been studied have been few, broadly defined, and have been defined based on the responses of a homogenous participant sample, predominantly white middle-class mothers. The long-term goal of the researchers is to assess how parental beliefs about emotion and parents' emotion-related behaviors influence and are themselves influenced by children's emotional well-being and affective social competence. In the present research it is proposed to begin this process by: (1) developing a questionnaire for parents that assesses their beliefs about children's emotions, and in which ethnic diversity is central in questionnaire development, (2) assessing the factor structure and demonstrating psychometric reliability and validity of the questionnaire for both mothers and fathers of children aged 4- to 10-years, in three different ethnic groups, and (3) examining the relationships between parents' beliefs about children's emotions and parents' behavior while discussing family conflicts, and (4) assessing how parental beliefs about emotion, and parental behaviors during parent-child discussions of conflict, are associated with children's frequency and complexity of emotion talk during those discussions. Future work will then be directed toward a more comprehensive examination of the relationship between parental beliefs and behaviors regarding emotion and children's affective social competence, including children's experience and expression of emotion. [unreadable] [unreadable]

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.