Collaborative Research: A Dynamic Multidimensional Examination of Parental Socialization of Children's Emotion Understanding and Social Competence in Middle Childhood

本研究旨在探讨母亲的情绪知识、教养方式和社交行为对三年级儿童情绪理解和社交能力的影响。情绪理解被定义为识别准确性（正确识别他人的情绪）和情绪知识（了解人们在某些情况下的感受以及这些情绪状态的原因和后果）。将测试一个概念模型，其中母亲对情感的信念；父母的教养方式和自身对情绪的理解通过母亲对情绪的社会化行为中介影响子女对情绪的理解。这个由调查人员组成的合作团队探索了情绪理解的多个组成部分之间的关系（包括人们在脸上表现出的情绪的准确性，以及人们何时、为何会有某种情绪，以及如何表现或控制自己的情绪）。他们还将研究儿童情感理解的多个组成部分如何影响儿童的社交技能以及与老师和同龄人的关系，并将在种族和阶级的背景下研究这些联系。该项目是第一个全面、动态和在关系中研究儿童情感理解的项目之一；充分探讨母亲教养方式、情绪相关信念和社会化行为对儿童情绪理解的影响；将母亲变量、儿童情绪理解和儿童在校社交能力纳入同一研究；并在完全平衡的设计中考虑种族和阶级对上述所有内容的影响，在这种设计中种族和阶级不会混淆。这项工作将为北卡罗来纳大学和北卡罗莱纳州立大学的研究培训提供机会，包括在种族和社会经济地位均衡的样本中来自代表性不足群体的参与者。此外，将为学生创造机会，从这个项目将产生的非常丰富的数据集中开拓自己的研究项目（例如，硕士或博士论文）。重要的是，该项目代表了NCSU心理学系与Frank Porter Graham儿童发展研究所和北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校发展科学中心之间的首次机构间合作；如果进展顺利，新的跨校园教育机会可能会出现。最后，研究者致力于传播他们的研究成果。

The purpose of this project is to examine the influence of mothers' knowledge of emotions, parenting style, and socializing behaviors on emotional understanding and social competence of their third grade children. Emotional understanding is defined as both recognition accuracy (correctly identifying emotions seen in others) and emotion knowledge (knowing what people feel in certain situations as well as the causes and consequences of those feeling states). A conceptual model will be tested in which mothers' beliefs about emotions; their parenting styles and their own understanding of emotions affect their children's emotional understanding as mediated through mother's socialization behaviors around emotions. The collaborative team of investigators explores relationships between multiple components of emotion understanding (including accuracy regarding emotions people show on their faces, and knowledge about when and why people have certain feelings, and show or control their feelings). They will also examine how the multiple components of children's emotion understanding affect children's social skills and relationships with teachers and peers, and each of these associations will be studied within the contexts of race and class. This project is one of the first to examine children's emotion understanding comprehensively, dynamically, and within relationships; to fully explore the effects of mothers' parenting styles, emotion-related beliefs, and socialization behaviors on children's emotion understanding; to include maternal variables, children's emotion understanding, and children's social competence in school in one study; and to consider the effects of race and class on all of the above within a fully balanced design in which race and class are not confounded.This work will provide opportunities for research training at both UNC and North Carolina State, including participants from underrepresented groups in a sample well-balanced by ethnicity and SES. In addition, opportunities will created for students to carve out their own research projects (e.g., for Masters or doctoral theses) from the very rich data set that will emerge from this project. Importantly, the project represents the first inter-institutional collaboration between the Psychology Department at NCSU and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and the Center for Developmental Science at UNC-Chapel Hill; if it goes well, new cross-campus educational opportunities could emerge. Finally, the investigators are committed to disseminating their research findings.