Do Parents Talk about Emotions with Their Children? The Questionnaire of Parent-Child Conversations about Emotions (QPCCE)

Emotion-related conversations between parents and their children have been shown to play a crucial role in children’s emotional development. During these conversations, parents may help their children to understand their own emotions and those of others better by emphasizing certain positive and negative emotions, by explaining causes and consequences of emotions, etc. In past research, parent-child emotion-related conversations have been assessed by means of an observational design. While this method has several advantages (e.g., ecological validity, qualitative data collection, etc.), it is time-consuming and generally restricted to one interaction. The goals of the present research were first to develop and validate a parent-report measure to evaluate parentchild emotion-related conversations (Questionnaire of Parent-Child Conversations about Emotions, QPCCE) (see Appendix) and then to examine its links with preschoolers’ social and emotional development. Study 1 presents the factorial structure, the internal consistency and the test-retest reliability of the QPCCE. Study 2 presents its convergent validity with an observational measure. Study 3 examines the links between parental emotion-related conversations and children’s social and emotional competences. The findings suggest that the QPCCE is a valid parent-report measure of parent-child emotion-related conversations, at least for mothers