Preschoolers' Emotion Regulation: The Roles Of Mothers' Personality, Maternal Control/Autonomy Support And Children's Temperament

Caregiving environment and parenting process both play important roles in the emotion socialization of the preschoolers. Research on parental emotion socialization beliefs and practices became one of the hottest research topics in developmental psychology. Initial studies in this domain focused exclusively on the effects of parenting on children's emotional development, while recently, more are targeting at the functions of other familial factors. A growing number of researchers paid their attention to the significance or impact of parents'and children's characteristics on the links between parenting and emotion regulatory abilities in children. Based on this research line, the current study is mainly designed to investigate the influence exerted by parenting (indexed by maternal control and autonomy support), familial factors (indexed by maternal personality and children's temperament) and their interactions in the preschools'emotion regulation.154 children (87 boys and 67 girls) ages 4-6 and their mothers were recruited from two kindergartens in Shanghai as the participants of this study. They were observed interacting for 10 min while working on the "Complex Shape Searching Task". Maternal control and autonomy support were coded in 1-min intervals using "Parental Control and Autonomy Support Coding Scheme". Meanwhile, preschoolers' emotion regulation was assessed by "Disappointing Gift Paradigm" and afterwards, coded by "Facial Expression of Emotion Coding System". Moreover, "NEO-FFI" was employed for the measurement of mothers'personality, while "CBQ" was for children's temperament. Both of the ratings were provided by mothers.The main conclusions of this study:(1) Generally, maternal control could significantly predict the lower emotion regulatory ability in preschoolers, while maternal autonomy support could significantly predict their higher emotion regulatory ability. These main effects were more evidently showed in girls than in boys. (2) Maternal openness and agreeableness were related to higher emotion regulation in preschoolers. These correlations were more clearly showed in boys than in girls.(3) Higher maternal openness combined with low maternal control and/or high autonomy support could predict the preschoolers'higher emotion regulation. Moreover, higher maternal agreeableness associated with low maternal control and/or high autonomy support was responsible for the higher emotion regulatory ability in boys.(4) Preschoolers whose anger/frustration was higher showed lower emotion regulatory ability.(5) Moderating roles of children's anger/frustration were found on the relationships between maternal control/autonomy support and children's emotion regulation.(6) Contrary to the hypothesis, high maternal autonomy support could not significantly enhance the emotion regulation ability in preschooler boys with high anger/frustration. Key words:maternal control/autonomy support; mothers'personality; children's temperament; emotion regulation...