CRANE RESEARCH FORUM RECAP: The Contribution of Fathers in Emotion Socialization
October 2021
Written by Delaney Morphew
Our October Research Forum featured Dr. Xin Feng, Crane Center faculty affiliate and assistant professor in the Department of Human Sciences. Dr. Feng’s research evaluates the process of emotion socialization – the idea that learning, understanding, expressing, and regulating emotions occurs in social contexts. She examines how this process connects to future socioemotional outcomes in children, with a particular emphasis on how fathers uniquely contribute to this development.
Early childhood is a sensitive developmental period for emotion socialization. Parents are typically the primary socialization agents for children and have great influence over children’s emotions through expression, and emotion-coaching. The study Dr. Feng’s presented took a naturalistic approach to unobtrusively observe the occurrence of parents’ emotion expression and coaching in children’s daily lives. The study examined both mothers and fathers in the same sample to better understand the differential impact a fathers’ role plays in social emotional processing.
Part one of the study examined children at home for one day and recorded the interactions between parent and child. Part two of the study observed children and parents engage in a 5-minute clean-up task in the lab. Both procedures were measured for parents’ positive emotion expression – laughing, singing, excitement; emotion coaching – validating child’s emotions, accepting, and reasoning; and the child’s positive and negative emotion expression.
KEY FINDINGS
The Unique Contribution of Fathers:
Fathers’ positive expression and coaching were associated with child positive expression at home.
Fathers’ emotion coaching predicted child positive expression in the lab.
Fathers’ emotional socialization behaviors tend to have stronger relations with child outcomes.
Mothers’ positive expression is also positively associated with child positive expression.
RECOMMENDATIONS
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In future research, it may be important to consider the differential relationship between the gender of parents and the gender of children during emotion socialization. Some research shows that mothers and fathers may react differently with boys and girls; investigating these gender relationships could be beneficial in future research.
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The role of fathers in emotion socialization is not as often observed, but it may be particularly important to understand in the context of disadvantaged familial environments or negative maternal influence.