Parents' discipline styles, children's verbal IQ and prosocial behaviors

Discipline techniques are a significant part of the parent-child relationship. This study investigated the relation of discipline techniques with children's understanding of emotion, prosocial behaviors, and verbal abilities. Children's verbal abilities have been associated with social competence and specific aspects of emotion knowledge. This study further investigated the relation of children's verbal abilities with emotion knowledge and prosocial behaviors. The relation of emotion knowledge and children's prosocial behaviors in the classroom was also investigated. Children's performance on a measure of emotion knowledge was also predicted to play a mediating role between measures of parent's discipline style and children's verbal IQ with children's prosocial behaviors. Of these hypotheses, mothers' discipline style was significantly related to stereotypic and total emotion knowledge, fathers' discipline style was more specifically and related to a measure of expressive labeling of emotions. Children's ability to expressively label emotions was also related to the frequency of prosocial behaviors in the classroom. Children's Verbal IQ scores were positively associated with stereotypic, non-stereotypic, and total emotion knowledge. In light of the relations between both mother's discipline styles and children's Verbal IQ scores with measures of children's emotion knowledge a regression analysis was performed. Both accounted for a significant amount of the variance.