Investigation of the association between mothers' emotion socialization behaviors and children's ability to understand emotions

This study examines whether mothers' emotion socialization practices via modeling, contingent reactions, and the teaching of emotions predict the emotion understanding skills of their 60- to 72-month-old children. The study group included 50 mothers and their children (23 boys, 27 girls). As data collection tools, the wordless book One Frog Too Many, emotion cards, the Mother-Child Information Form, Denham's Affect Knowledge Test, the Test of Early Language Development-Third Edition-Turkish, the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale, and the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire were used. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to explore the predictive role of the mothers' emotion socialization behaviors in their children's emotion understanding skills. In addition, descriptive analysis was carried out using a coding scheme to determine the techniques used by the mothers while teaching the children about emotions. The results showed no predictive association between the studied emotion socialization practices of mothers and the children's abilities to understand emotions. Explaining was the technique that the mothers used most often while reading the wordless book. This was respectively followed by labeling, commenting, questioning, socializing, guiding, and clarifying. The mothers' most commonly used technique while talking with their children was questioning, respectively followed by socializing, labeling, explaining, commenting, clarifying, and guiding techniques.