Prosocial Behavior in Early Childhood: The Contributions of Parental Emotional Expressiveness and Children's Physiological Regulation
Open Access
- Author:
- Mac Neill, Leigha Alexandra
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- December 15, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Alysia Yvonne Blandon, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- prosocial behavior
physiological regulation
family systems
emotion socialization - Abstract:
- Prosocial development in early childhood plays an important role in children’s social adjustment throughout the lifespan (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad, 2006). The family is a proximal socialization context that teaches children about the emotional states of others and how to respond to such states (Valiente, Eisenberg, Fabes, Shepard, Cumberland, & Losoya, 2004). Emotional expressiveness, emotions that parents express in the presence of their children, influences how their children respond in social events, such as ones that encourage prosocial behavior (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). There is some research to suggest that parents’ emotion socialization contributes to the physiological mechanisms that regulate children’s social engagement (e.g., Hastings & De, 2008). It is important to address that studying one parent and one child in the family does not fully capture children’s emotion socialization environment, thus the current study examined whether the associations between mothers’ and fathers’ emotional expressiveness and children’s prosocial behavior differed for two children in the same family. Additionally, it examined if children’s baseline RSA moderated the associations between parents’ emotional expressiveness and children’s prosocial behavior. This study utilized data from a larger study of 70 families, including mothers, fathers, older siblings, and younger siblings. The results indicated that higher levels of mothers’ positive emotional expressiveness were associated with greater sharing. Further, significant interactions between parental emotional expressiveness and sibling, as well as between parental emotional expressiveness and baseline RSA, emerged. The results also indicated significant relations between ratios of parents’ emotional expressions and children’s sharing. The current study stresses the importance of examining emotion socialization and physiological regulation in the development of prosocial behavior from a family systems perspective.