Examination of Mothers' Metaemotion Philosophy in Relation to Children's Problem Behaviors
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Date
2021-11
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Abstract
Parental meta-emotion Philosophy (PMEP) is parents' set of feelings and thoughts, that are organized, towards their own emotions and their children's emotions (Gottman et al., 1996). PMEP includes parents' own expression and regulation of emotion, parents' reactions to children's expression of emotion, and parents' coaching and discussion of children's emotions (Eisenberg et al., 2009). PMEP is a key player in children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Cohodes et al., 2017). Thus, this study aims to elucidate how various dimensions in PMEP correlate to children's problem behaviors.
The participant pool consists of 87 mothers with a mean age of 35.06 years (SD = 4.76) where 81.6% of them are white, 11.5% are Black, 6.9% are other races. Mothers have a child between the ages of 3-5 years. Forty-five of the children were girls. A semi-structured interview process is conducted to assess the mothers' own experiences about her emotions of sadness, anger, and fear and philosophies on emotional control and expressiveness. Mothers were also interviewed about their emotions, attitudes, and behaviors with regards to their children's sadness, anger, and fear. All the responses and accounts of experiences are from mothers' perspectives. Two regression analyses were run, one on each dependent variable, including children's internalizing and externalizing problems. Results indicated that parents' awareness, expressivity, and acceptance of their own negative emotions were significantly associated with children's internalizing but not externalizing problems. Specifically, mothers' awareness (β = 4.90, p =.036) and acceptance of negative emotions (β = 3.90, p =.050) were positively associated with children's internalizing problems, while mothers' expressivity was negatively associated with children's internalizing problems (β = -6.00, p =.013). These findings suggest that PMEP plays a pivotal role in these psychosocial adjustments and growth of children through varying ages (Kiff et al., 2011).
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Problem behaviors, Metaemotion, Internalizing, Externalizing