Cognitive Development Of Children's Emotional Expression Rules And Temperament, Maternal Parenting Style,

Emotional display rules are a suit of internal rules that we follow to express feelings in order to adapt to social and cultural environment. It governs the appropriateness of our emotional expressive behaviors. Display rules provide for individuals how to show emotion in specific social situations, regardless of their internal emotional experience. Children's cognitive construction of emotional display rules was an important task during their socialization of emotion. The understanding and use of emotional display rules plays an important role in children's social development. Children's development of emotional display rules and its related factors is an important subject for study.The existing researches have revealed that children's development of emotional display rules are influenced by family environment, culture and other external factors, but there are a few study about the relation between children's own characteristics and their development of display rules. This study was to investigate the cognitive development of children's display rules, and its relations to maternal parenting and children's temperament.In this study,146 children's understanding of emotional display rules were examined through structure interviews, and their mothers received the questionnaire survey. The results show that:(1) Children's display rules had significant grade difference. There was significantly development of understanding from gradel to grade 3, and older children are more likely to mask anger than the younger.(2) Children's expression regulation knowledge of different grade was varied based on emotion type. In angry and sad situations, the second and third grade children's level of the expression regulation knowledge are higher than the first grade children, while there was no difference between the second and third grade children's expression regulation knowledge. In the happy scene, the three grades children's expression regulation knowledge have significant differences, with the grade increased, children's expression regulation knowledge score increased.(3)Children reported different level of expression regulation knowledge in a variety of audience figures. Children are more likely to mask anger in face of parents than peer. In the happy situation, children's level of expression regulation knowledge in face of mothers and peers were higher than that when dealing with fathers.(4) The second and third grade children reported more pro-social display rules goals and norm-maintaining goals than one grade children, and girls reported pro-social display rules goals more than boys.(5) Children's effortful control can positively predict children's expression regulation knowledge, while children's negative emotionality can negatively predict children's expression regulation knowledge.(6) Every factor of mother's parenting behaviors was correlated with children's expression regulation knowledge. Mother's warmth and understanding can positively predict children's expression regulation knowledge.(7) Mother's warmth and understanding have mediating influence on the relationship between children's negative emotionality and expression regulation knowledge. Similarly, mother's warmth and understanding served as a partial mediator in the relationship between children's effortful control and expression regulation knowledge.