Family Expressiveness and Children's Emotion Understanding

Abstract

This study is to investigate the relation between family emotion expressiveness and child emotion understanding. Research has indicated that children with better emotion understanding show greater social competence, enhanced peer relations, and fewer problem behaviors (Cassidy, Parke, Butkovsky & Braungart, 1992; Castro, Halberstadt, Lozada & Craig, 2015). However, much of the previous research has relied on self-report, such as the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire (FEQ; Halberstadt, 1986), to assess family expressiveness, and most of this line of research has focused on mothers’ emotion expressiveness. The goal of this study is to further the understanding of the impact of family expressiveness (both fathers’ and mothers’ emotion expressiveness) on children’s ability to recognize emotion expressions. Additionally this study examines whether there are differences in mothers’ and fathers’ expressiveness and whether the relation between parents’ expressiveness and child emotion understanding varies by child gender. Participants were 61 families drawn from a larger, longitudinal study; these families have been recruited from central Ohio, have children between the ages of 3 and 3.5 years. The daily conversations within the family were collected using an iPod Touch. The recordings were coded for family expressiveness. To assess emotion understanding, children were asked to recognize basic emotion expressions (happy, sad, angry, scared, and neutral) in the laboratory setting. The proposed study can deepen our understanding on how family expressiveness based on naturalistic observation predicts children’s emotion understanding.