Developmental Brown Bag: Socialization of children’s emotions

Given that emotions are omnipresent in everyone’s lives and serve invaluable functions, it is critical for children to learn from socializers about different aspects of emotional expressions and ways to develop optimal emotion related capacities. In this talk, I will present 3 recent studies of mine that focused on children’s emotions and the socialization of children’s emotions. First, I will describe a study where I examined how the interaction of anger and sadness would be related to child persistence drawing on the functional theory of emotions. In the second study, I will present my research on the intergenerational transmission of emotion regulation, where my findings support how parents’ own emotion regulation is related to children’s regulation. Third, I was interested in examining the cultural differences in mothers’ emotion regulation and emotion socialization across the Chinese and American cultures. My findings highlight how social expectations are associated with differences in maternal emotion socialization patterns.