The Effect of Maternal Emotion Socialization on Children’s Social Competence

The goals of the present study were: 1) to describe and provide initial support for the validity of the Future Scenarios Questionnaire (FSQ) based on a translation of the Lundell’s (2008) original instrument, a new self-report questionnaire designed to measure parental responding to anticipated children’s negative emotions; and 2) to examine how maternal responses on the FSQ related to young children’s aggressive, asocial, and prosocial behaviors with peers. Further, this study examined whether the temperamental trait of negative affect moderated the relation between maternal responses on the FSQ and children’s social adjustment outcomes. Participants were 107 mothers of preschool-age children. They were requested to provide ratings on the FSQ and child temperament ratings on the Child Behavior Questionnaire. They also completed a range of measures which were designed to assess the construct validity of the FSQ. These included measures of attachment representations, maternal mind-mindedness, perceived control, and alexithymia. Thirty-two teachers provided ratings on the Child Behavior Scale for children’s aggressive, asocial, and prosocial behaviors in the peer context. Factor analysis of the FSQ revealed two subscales: Encourage Emotion Expression (EEE) and Discourage Emotion Expression (DEE). Patterns of correlations among these subscales and the criterion mother measures mentioned above suggested that the FSQ demonstrates some construct validity. Further, the results of the moderation analyses showed that maternal response to the FSQ interacts with negative affect in the prediction of child behaviors, but not in the hypothesized ways. In particular, discouraging emotion expression significantly predicted less asocial behavior and more prosocial behavior (approached significance), but only for children rated high in negative affect. None of these relations was significant for children rated low in negative affect. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the importance of child temperament in emotion socialization processes