Parents Emotional Comprehension Of Children's Negative Emotional Reaction With Young Children

Young children's emotional understanding competence constitutes a key component of their social cognition competence, because they so frequently draw on this understanding in the course of social interaction. The development of emotional understanding help young children to communicate their own feelings and predict others' feelings and behaviors, and it's also helpful for the development of emotional regulation and social functioning. Young children's expressions of negative affect provide a special context in which parents interact with their children. How parents respond to their children's emotional displays, especially those involving negative affect, has important implications for children's emotional understanding.Based on the analysis of the literacy about parents'coping with children's negative emotions, 270 young children aged from three to five and their parents are surveyed in this study. Test and story-telling interview are applied in study 1, in which we try to find out young children's emotional understanding developmental characteristics. Questionnaire is applied in study 2, in which we strive to know the ways how parents cope with their children's negative emotions. Based on these, we analyze the relation between young children's emotional understanding and parents'coping with their children's negative affect.The major findings in the above two studies are as follows:1. Children aged from three to five can understand emotions basically. The level of children's emotional understanding increased with age. Children around three to four are in the critical period of the emotional understanding. The gender difference is significant, girls perform better than boys. Children understand positive emotions better than negative emotions.2. The development levels of different aspects of emotional understanding are not balanced. Children understand desire-based emotions earlier than belief-based emotions.3. Parents use supportive reactions more than nonsupportive reactions to cope with their children's negative emotions.4. The parental gender difference of parents'reactions to cope with their children's negative emotions is significant. Mothers use supportive reactions to cope with their children's negative emotions more than fathers. Fathers use nonsupportive reactions to cope with their children's negative emotions more than mothers.5. The children gender difference of parents'reactions to cope with their children's negative emotions is significant. Parents use supportive reactions to cope with girls'negative emotions more than boys'. Parents use nonsupportive reactions to cope with boys'negative emotions more than girls'.6. Young children's emotional understanding competence is related positively to parents'supportive reactions to cope with their children's negative emotions significantly and related negatively to parents'nonsupportive reactions.