Shipkova Michelle, Milojevich Helen, Lindquist Kristen A, Sheridan Margaret A
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Emotion. 2025 May 26. doi: 10.1037/emo0001543.
Emotion understanding and emotion regulation play important roles in children's development, but we have only a limited understanding of how these constructs are socialized. Constructionist theories suggest that as children engage in interactions with caregivers, they learn to associate words naming emotion categories with conceptual representations of specific emotions, leading to greater emotion understanding. In this preregistered study, we posit emotion word knowledge as a key feature of emotion understanding. Using path analysis with a cross-sectional sample of 252 mainly low socioeconomic status children (aged 4-8 years) and their caregivers collected between 2018 and 2024, we examined indirect effects of implicit parental emotion socialization (difficulties with emotion regulation and emotional expressivity) on children's emotion regulation through children's emotion word knowledge. While parental difficulties with emotion regulation and expressivity were unrelated to children's emotion word knowledge, child emotion word knowledge predicted parent reports of children's adaptive emotion regulation. In addition, we observed an indirect effect of children's verbal intelligence on adaptive emotion regulation through children's emotion word knowledge. In contrast, we observed a direct effect of parental difficulties with emotion regulation on children's dysregulation. These findings align with constructionist theories underscoring the importance of emotion word knowledge for the development of emotion regulation skills and begin to shine light on how family contexts might support children's development of emotion word knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
情绪理解和情绪调节在儿童发展中起着重要作用，但我们对这些概念如何在社会环境中形成的了解有限。建构主义理论认为，当儿童与照顾者互动时，他们学会将命名情绪类别的词语与特定情绪的概念表征联系起来，从而增强情绪理解。在这项预先注册的研究中，我们将情绪词汇知识视为情绪理解的一个关键特征。通过对2018年至2024年间收集的252名主要为社会经济地位较低的儿童（4至8岁）及其照顾者的横断面样本进行路径分析，我们研究了父母隐性情绪社会化（情绪调节和情绪表达方面的困难）通过儿童的情绪词汇知识对儿童情绪调节的间接影响。虽然父母在情绪调节和表达方面的困难与儿童的情绪词汇知识无关，但儿童的情绪词汇知识预测了父母报告的儿童适应性情绪调节情况。此外，我们观察到儿童的语言智力通过儿童的情绪词汇知识对适应性情绪调节产生间接影响。相比之下，我们观察到父母情绪调节困难对儿童情绪失调有直接影响。这些发现与建构主义理论一致，强调了情绪词汇知识对情绪调节技能发展的重要性，并开始揭示家庭环境可能如何支持儿童情绪词汇知识的发展。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2025美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
