Psychological Development and Education ›› 2011, Vol. 27 ›› Issue (3): 233-240.

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Preschooler’s Emotion Understanding Development and Its Relation with Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy

LIANG Zong-bao1, ZHANG Guang-zhen1, CHEN Hui-chang2, ZHANG Ping3   

  1. 1. Key Laboratory of Child Development and Learning Science, Ministry of Education, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China;
    2. Institute of Developmental Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China;
    3. School of Social Development and Public Policy, Department of Psychology, FuDan University, Shanghai 200433, China
  • Online:2011-05-15 Published:2011-05-15

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Abstract: Children's emotion understanding is a core component of social cognition,and it is very important to their social interaction with peers and later social adjustment.Parental socialization of emotion has obtained more and more attention during the past two decades.Parental meta-emotion philosophy refers to parents' feelings and approaches to their own and their children's emotions,which reflects parental beliefs and goals of emotion socialization.Parental beliefs and goals have important effect on children's emotion understanding.The current study explored the developmental trend of preschoolers' emotion understanding,and then examined the relation between parental meta-emotion philosophy and preschoolers' emotion understanding.Three hundred and forty-one children aged 3-5 and their parents participated in the study.Children's emotion understanding was assessed by research assistants on Denham's puppet play task.Fathers and mothers reported their own meta-emotion philosophy on Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy Scale (PMEPQ) respectively.Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Multiple Regression linear (MRL) analyses indicated:(1) Girls' emotion recognition was explicitly better than boys; (2) Preschoolers' emotion understanding showed significant developmental trend,and elder preschoolers' emotion understanding competence was significantly better than younger; (3) Maternal emotion-noninvolvement was positively associated with preschoolers' emotion recognition; maternal emotion-dysfunction was negatively associated with preschoolers' emotion recognition; (4) Paternal emotion-dysfunction was positively associated with preschoolers' emotion recognition and emotion situationunderstanding.

Key words: preschoolers, emotion understanding, parental meta-emotion philosophy, socialization of emotion

CLC Number: 

  • B844.1
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