Brief ReportPhysiology and functioning: Parents’ vagal tone, emotion socialization, and children’s emotion knowledge
Introduction
By preschool, children have arrived at the point where understanding of emotions becomes paramount. At this age, children begin to spend less time in their home environment and move to a setting in which their first nonfamilial social relationships are formed. They must rely less on the emotional coaching of their caregivers and begin to demonstrate affective competence in their independent social interactions. Emotion knowledge, or understanding the emotional reactions of others and the situations that likely cause them, is a key component of emotional competence and contributes to the development of the ability to engage in successful social interactions (Denham et al., 2003, Halberstadt et al., 2001). Children who are able to accurately read the emotional expressions of others and predict a likely emotional reaction in a given social situation can use this information to negotiate interpersonal interaction and successfully function in their new world of peer relationships. The current study employs a multimethod approach to investigate emotion situation knowledge and emotion expression knowledge in young children and probes the socialization and physiological concomitants of its development.
Parents must actively socialize their children to understand the norms of emotional behavior, a process often referred to as emotional socialization (Halberstadt et al., 1993, Pollak and Thoits, 1989). Parents socialize their children through means such as emotional discourse, reaction to their children’s emotions, and modeling. They can set the stage for their children’s future emotion knowledge both directly through teaching of emotional information and indirectly through their own emotional actions and reactions.
Previous research findings are consistent with the premise that children’s emotional competence develops, at least in part, within the context of parental emotion socialization. Studies have shown that parents who socialize their children by modeling positive expressive styles, showing high levels of emotional responsiveness, encouraging their children’s own emotional expression, and discussing emotional events have more affectively competent children (Denham et al., 1997, Denham et al., 1994). Relating directly to emotion knowledge, studies have also shown that children better understand emotion when parents are emotionally expressive and responsive (Denham & Grout, 1992) and foster an atmosphere of positive emotional expressiveness within the home (Denham & Kochanoff, 2002). Previous studies also indicate that adequate balance of both positive and negative emotions in the family environment is indicative of children’s adept emotional functioning (Eisenberg and Fabes, 1994, Valiente et al., 2006). Although the previous literature has established a link between parental socialization of emotion and children’s emotional competence, the specific mechanisms underlying this relationship are still under investigation.
Emotional behaviors, whether in adults or in children, are believed to have an underlying physiological basis and to be influenced by people’s physiological regulation. Cardiac vagal tone (VT), a measure of the variability in heart rate (Porges, 1995), is commonly used as an index of such regulation. Optimal resting VT is thought to underlie adaptive behavioral and emotional responses to environmental demands (Porges, Dousard-Roosevelt, & Maiti, 1994). Multiple studies of emotion during early childhood have found that high baseline VT is associated with several aspects of emotional competence, including but not limited to appropriate affective responding (Calkins, 1997), better emotion regulation (Fox, 1989), and fewer internalizing and externalizing behavior problems (El-Sheikh, Harger, & Whitson, 2001). However, it must be noted that a consistent relationship between VT and emotional competence is not always found (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 1995).
Although links between underlying physiological systems and overt emotional behaviors may develop during infancy and early childhood, they also are evident during adulthood (Butler et al., 2006, Gross, 2002). Thus, parents’ emotion socialization behaviors might be expected to be influenced by their own physiological regulation. For example, parents with higher resting VT might be more likely to foster a positive emotional environment and encourage emotional expression by their children. As described above, these socialization behaviors have been associated with children’s emotion competence and, in particular, the development of emotion knowledge. Furthermore, due to shared genes and environment, parents and children might possibly show similarity in the physiological systems that influence competent emotional functioning.
Thus, our study seeks to investigate the links between parental physiological regulation and their emotion socialization behaviors that, in turn, may affect children’s developing emotion knowledge. Although previous research has examined relationships between children’s physiological systems and overt emotional behavior, no study has addressed linkages among parents’ VT, their emotion socialization behaviors, and the emotional development of their children.
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 44 4- or 5-year-olds (25 boys and 19 girls, mean age = 59.05 months, SD = 5.36) and their primary caregivers recruited from the local community. Most children were tested with their mothers; however, 3 children were tested with their fathers and 1 was tested with a grandmother because these were their primary caregivers. The ethnic distribution of the sample reflected that of the mid-sized, southeastern U.S. town (68% Caucasian, 23% African American, 9% Hispanic/Asian/Middle
Data reduction
To form more comprehensive measures of parental emotion socialization, subscales from the CCNES and SEFQ were combined. Following the theoretical distinction and empirical findings of Eisenberg and Fabes (1994), we created aggregate CCNES scores of dismissing behaviors and coaching behaviors. This was accomplished by totaling those subscales hypothesized to indicate negative parental emotion socialization practices (i.e., the minimizing, punitive, and distress reaction subscales) and those
Discussion
The current study is the first to demonstrate links between parents’ physiological regulation and their emotion socialization practices. Parents with higher resting VT reported more desirable emotion socialization behaviors. We also found that parents with high resting VT, indicative of better regulation abilities, had children who were more knowledgeable about emotional situations. In addition, replicating previous studies, we found relationships between parental emotion socialization and
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a Duke Interdisciplinary Initiative in Social Psychology (DIISP) grant provided through Duke University. We gratefully acknowledge the participation of the children and families who volunteered to be part of our study. We also thank Elizabeth Kauffman and the Duke psychology and neuroscience graduate students for their help in creating project stimuli, Susanne Denham for allowing us to use her emotion knowledge task, and Parul Kakar, Jenny Feldman, Blair Burke,
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