Sadness, Anger, and Frustration: Gendered Patterns in Early Adolescents’ and Their Parents’ Emotion Talk (original) (raw)
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1993
This study examined the effects of adolescent pubertal status, adolescent gender, parent gender, and conversation topic on parent and adolescent affective expression. Subjects were 85 adolescents in fifth through ninth grade who participated in 2 separate 8-minute conversations, one pleasant and one unpleasant, with their mother and father separately. Results showed that in general, less positive and more negative affect was expressed during late puberty than during early-or mid-puberty. Father-adolescent interactions were more neutral than mother-adolescent interactions. Pleasant conversations were more neutral, and contained more positive and less negative affect, than unpleasant conversations. Results are discussed in terms of the distancing hypothesis, dyadic differences in relationships, and situational influences.
Gender differences in parentchild emotion narratives
Sex Roles, 2000
Early parentchild conversations about past emotional experiences provide a rich environment for the socialization of emotions. This study explored the role of parent and child gender in this process. Participants were 21 White, middle-class, 40-to 45-month-old children and their ...
Parent Gender Differences in Emotion Socialization Behaviors Vary by Ethnicity and Child Gender
Parenting, 2015
Objective-This study examined ethnicity (African American, European American, and Lumbee American Indian) and child gender as moderators of gender differences in parents' emotion socialization behaviors. Design-Mothers and fathers from two samples responded to questionnaires assessing self expressiveness in the family (N=196) or reactions to children's negative emotions (N=299). Results-Differences between mothers and fathers varied as a function of ethnicity. Mothers and fathers showed similar levels of negative expressiveness in European American and African American families, whereas fathers were more negatively expressive than mothers in Lumbee families. Mothers reported more supportive reactions than fathers among European Americans and Lumbees, but African American mothers and fathers reported nearly equal levels of supportive reactions. Parent gender x ethnicity interactions were further moderated by child gender. Mothers were generally more supportive of girls' negative emotions than fathers across all ethnicities. For boys, however, parent gender differences in supportive reactions to negative emotions varied by ethnicity. Mothers were more supportive than fathers among European American parents of boys, but mothers were less supportive than fathers among African American parents of boys. Conclusions-Results highlight the contextualized nature of emotion socialization, and the need to consider ethnicity and child gender as influences on mothers' and fathers' gender-specific emotion socialization.
Gender and parents' reactions to children's emotion during the preschool years
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2010
In this chapter, the authors examine the differences between mothers and fathers in the socialization of specifi c emotions in preschool-aged boys and girls. They argue that mothers and fathers play both distinct and complementary roles in the development of children' s emotional competence; these roles are infl uenced both by parents' own gender, as well as the child' s gender and the type of emotion being socialized. Through analyses of descriptive data, it appears that mothers and fathers respond to their children' s emotions differently. The authors provide a discussion of the potential underlying reasons and potential implications for distinct emotion socialization by mothers and fathers.
Developmental and gender differences in the language for emotions across the adolescent years
Cognition & Emotion, 2004
Most information about the development of emotion language comes from studies of the early acquisition of terms for emotions. This study examined emotion language in 303 adolescents aged between 12 and 18 years. It used a theoretically derived classification model to describe and examine age-dependent changes and gender differences in the semantic, referential, and causal structure of their language for emotions in response to vignette material containing the prototypical condition for anger and fear. The semantic profiles of emotion terms produced emphasise the nonuniqueness of``theoretical'' emotional conditions with blends and combination of emotion terms typical in the linguistic representation of emotions of these adolescents. The results demonstrate continuity in the development of adolescent emotion language with more differentiated, broader, and less semantically specific emotion referents being produced with older age. However, the results also show a shift with age in the representation of emotions toward a more externalised focus at the expense of a subjectivist/experiential focus. Boys showed a relative preference for expressive/behavioural referents while girls produced more inner directed and less semantically specified referents. However, girls' expected relative preference for referents with a cognitive focus was not confirmed. Overall, the results indicate that the structure of emotion language in adolescents is age-dependent and sensitive to gender-related``display rules'' for talking about emotions and their causes. The implications of the results for advancing the study of the language of emotions are discussed within the limitations and constraints imposed by studying experimentally elicited language.
Parental Emotion Socialization in Adolescence: Differences in Sex, Age and Problem Status
Social Development, 2007
There is a paucity of research on how mothers and fathers socialize emotion in their adolescent sons and daughters. This study was based on 220 adolescents (range 11-to 16-years-old) who exhibit a range of emotional and behavioral problems and their parents. Parental responses to their children's displays of sadness, anger and fear were assessed. Mothers were found to be more engaged in their children's emotional lives than were fathers. With a few important exceptions (e.g., boys were punished for expressions of anger more than girls), adolescent girls and boys were socialized in much the same way. Parents of older adolescents were generally less supportive and more punitive toward emotional displays. Systematic links between adolescent problem status and parent approaches to emotion socialization were found. These findings on how parents socialize emotions in their adolescents have important implications for theory as well as practice.
Journal of Family Psychology, 2009
The present research examined parental beliefs about children's negative emotions, parentreported marital conflict/ambivalence, and child negative emotionality and gender as predictors of mothers' and fathers' reported reactions to their kindergarten children's negative emotions and self-expressiveness in the family (N ϭ 55, two-parent families). Models predicting parents' nonsupportive reactions and negative expressiveness were significant. For both mothers and fathers, more accepting beliefs about children's negative emotions were associated with fewer nonsupportive reactions, and greater marital conflict/ambivalence was associated with more negative expressiveness. Furthermore, interactions between child negative emotionality and parental resources (e.g., marital conflict/ambivalence; accepting beliefs) emerged for fathers' nonsupportive reactions and mothers' negative expressiveness. In some instances, child gender acted as a moderator such that associations between parental beliefs about emotions and the emotion socialization outcomes emerged when child and parent gender were concordant.
Preschool children's emotional expressions with peers: The roles of gender and emotion socialization
Sex Roles, 1997
This study examined whether mothers and fathers reported using different emotion socialization strategies and whether these differences were related to preschoolers' gender and emotional expressiveness during peer play. Ninety percent of the children were Caucasian, 6% were Asian-American, and 4% were Mexican-American. The positive expressive behavior of 82 preschoolers participating in two conflict eliciting situations with two same gender peers were coded. The scores for the two sessions were averaged. All of the mothers and 63 of the fathers were administered three emotion socialization questionnaires. Results revealed that girls expressed more positive emotion than boys. In addition, mothers and fathers also reported using different emotion socialization practices and, in some cases, this was dependent upon their child's gender. The findings also showed that mothers' and fathers' reports of emotion socialization practices were differentially related to children's emotionally expressive behavior during peer play. In addition, fathers' emotion socialization practices accounted for unique variance in children's emotionally expressive behavior over and above that explained by the maternal emotion socialization variables. These findings highlight the importance of mothers' and fathers' emotion socialization practices for preschoolers' emotional competence in emotionally challenging situations with peers.
Personality and Individual Differences, 1998
Using a recently published self report measure of emotional expressivity (EES; Kring et a/., 1994) and a measure of family expressiveness, we investigated gender differences in ratings of individual and family emotional expressivity. Participants included 27 undergraduate men and 80 undergraduate women who completed self report inventories of their own and their families' emotional expressivity. Mothers and fathers of participants used the same instruments to rate their children's, their own and their families' overall expressivity. Both mothers and fathers were more in agreement with their daughters on the daughters' emotional expressivity and the overall family expressivity than they were with their sons. Parents' ratings were uncorrelated with their sons' ratings of these variables. However, mothers and fathers differed with their offspring in the assessment of the level of positive and negative emotion in the family. For both male and female children, mothers' ratings of positive, but not negative, emotion were correlated with children's ratings. The opposite pattern was apparent for fathers. Fathers' ratings of negative, but not positive emotion in the family were correlated with both sons' and daughters' ratings. 0