Emotion self-awareness, temperament and socialization: Measuring and understanding the antecedents of emotional competence

Preschoolers' ability to demonstrate awareness of their own emotion is an important socioemotional competence which has received increasing attention in both the theoretical and applied developmental literatures. The present study addressed the complex task of measuring children's emotion self-awareness of happiness, sadness, and anger as measured in the context of a delay of gratification task. In addition, child temperament and maternal socialization practices were examined to understand their longitudinal predictions to children's emotion self-awareness skill. When placed in a context designed to elicit negative emotion, children were able to demonstrate self-awareness of their own happiness and sadness as measured by the concordance between their expressed and self-reported emotion. Furthermore, maternal supportive socialization practices when children were 4.5 years of age were predictive of an increase in children's awareness of happiness one year later, while maternal non-supportive socialization practices predicted detriments to children's awareness of sadness. Self-awareness of anger, in contrast, appeared to be associated with children's receptive language development and was not explained by maternal emotion socialization factors. Lastly, temperamental emotionality was not predictive of children's emotion self-awareness. These findings offer an important contribution to our understanding of children's developing knowledge about their own experience of emotion and the precursors related to children's skill in identifying their own feelings within emotion-eliciting contexts.