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Maternal Expressive Style and Children's Emotional Development

Jackie A Nelson1, Marion O'Brien1, Susan D Calkins1

  • 1School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA.

Infant and Child Development
|February 11, 2014
PubMed

Maternal expressive styles, based on a combination of positive and negative expressive patterns, were identified at two points in time and related to multiple aspects of preschool children's emotional development. Mother-child pairs from 260 families participated when the children were 3 years old, and 240 participated again at aged 4 years. Expressive styles were identified at age 3 using cluster analysis, replicated at age 4 and examined in relation to children's emotional understanding, expressiveness and regulation. Three expressive styles were identified: high positive/low negative, very low positive/average negative and average positive/very high negative. Cluster membership was stable in 63% of families from age 3 to 4 years; no systematic patterns of change were evident in the remaining families. Expressive style was related to aspects of children's emotional expression at 3 years and to emotion expression and regulation at 4 years. Children's expressiveness and regulation at age 3 were also related to changes in mothers' expressive styles over 1 year. Identifying mothers' expressive styles provides a unique way to understand the potential role of the emotional climates in which preschool-aged children learn to express and regulate their own emotions.

Keywords:
emotion knowledgeemotion regulationemotional climateemotional expressionnegative expressivenesspositive expressiveness

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