Learning-Relevant Emotion Socialization: Validation of a Novel Questionnaire Measure for Mothers and Fathers from Diverse Racial/Ethnic Backgrounds in the United States

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When children fail at a learning activity or get overwhelmed by a task, they may get frustrated or discouraged. Successfully coping with these negative emotions has implications for children’s mental health, learning-related behaviors, and success in school. As children transition to formal schooling, they face many learning-related challenges, and parents’ emotion socialization strategies can shape how children regulate their emotions and behavior in the face of these challenges. The proposed research will refine and validate a measure of parents’ learning-relevant emotion socialization (LRES), a novel, brief questionnaire. This measure is innovative in two major ways. First, in contrast to other measures of emotion socialization, it focuses on situations in which young school-aged children experience learning-related frustration or discouragement, such as solving challenging puzzles or doing a demanding chore. Second, the measure includes emotion socialization strategies that specifically apply to learning-related situations (e.g., encouraging the child to persist instead of giving up in the face of difficulties). Building on previous research documenting differences in emotion socialization between mothers and fathers and across racial/ethnic groups, the proposed research will produce a measure of emotion socialization that is invariant across mothers and fathers from the four largest racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. (Non-Hispanic Black, Non-Hispanic White, Hispanic, and Asian) and evaluate value of any group-specific items. The study design includes a systematic, empirically rigorous investigation of the intersection of parents’ gender and race/ethnicity in the context of emotion socialization. The study will begin with parent interviews (N = 32) that will be used to refine the content of our previously piloted measure. Then the LRES measure and other surveys will be distributed to 1,600 mothers and fathers equally balanced across the four racial/ethnic groups and stratified by income and education. First, convergent/divergent validity with socialization of negative emotions in social situations will be examined. Second, the factor structure of LRES and measurement invariance will be established across groups. Third, differences in prevalence between mothers and fathers and across racial/ethnic groups will be tested. Finally, the proposed research will examine predictive validity by testing how LRES relates to children’s mental health, learning-related behavior, and school success, including whether these associations differ between mothers and fathers and/or across racial/ethnic groups. This study will contribute to developmental, clinical, and educational research by creating a psychometrically robust measure of parent emotion socialization in the context of learning, an important predictor of child outcomes that can exacerbate or buffer risk for maladaptation within the school context. This proposed project is consistent with the R21 mechanism, by developing a novel measure and methodology that could have a major impact on both parenting and educational interventions aimed at promoting the mental health, learning, and school success of racially/ethnically diverse young school-aged children.