Family Expressiveness And Preschoolers’ Anxiety:the Contribution Of Emotion Regulation Strategy Understanding

In recent years, researches relating to the family sprouted dramatically, its importance became highly valued accordingly. Some researchers found that family is an important social environment for kids to develop its personalities and social abilities. Parents’ emotional traits would likely to influence the outcome of kids’emotion development. The previous studies had found that mothers with anxiety trait would more likely to have preschoolers with emotional dysfunction, resulted in their poor social competence. Moreover, if a preschooler is raised up in a family expressing more criticism and blame, he is more likely have anxiety disorder and formed an insecure attachment with his parents. Consequently, more scholars emphasize on the family contributions to negative emotion trait formation, considering the fact of dysfunctional emotion parents tend to pass the negative "genes" to their children. Emotion regulation, however, attracted an increasing number of researchers’attention and provided an insightful perspective for further study. It is supported that the negative emotion traits parents possessed and family emotion expressivity affected the overall development of preschoolers’emotion regulation which influences the anxiety level. But emotion regulation ability starts from emotion regulation s strategy understanding. Hence, the paper aims at solving the questions below:①the relationship between family emotional expressivity and preschoolers’emotion regulation strategy understanding;②the relationship between preschoolers’emotion regulation understanding and anxiety;③the role of emotion regulation strategy understanding plays between family expressivity and anxiety.80preschoolers participated in our research, with42boys and38girls. In study1, we administered a puppet procedure to measure preschoolers’emotion regulation strategy understanding and examined the age and gender effect. Based on the results of study1, we collected the date on family expressivity and preschooler anxiety through the questionnaires of Family Expressiveness Questionnaire (Halbesrtadt et al., EFQ) and Spence Preschooler Anxiety Scale(Spence et al.,2001) respectively and analyzed the correlation relationship between those three variables with SPSS17.0.The major findings in the above two studies are as follows: (1) The strategy recognition was significant related with age. As age increases, preschoolers display a better ability to recognize the effective emotion regulation strategy and the rate of growth, according to the slope, is faster between5-6yrs than3-5yrs. The age effect is significant in child strategy generation of anger, not in child strategy generation of sadness.(2) The gender effect is not significant both in child strategy recognition and generation.(3) Overall speaking, family positive expressiveness was not significant related with preschooler anxiety; family negative expressive was significant related with preschooler anxiety. Specifically, generalized anxiety was related significantly with positive dominant family expressiveness and positive submissive family expressiveness, social anxiety was correlated significantly with negative dominant family expressiveness, separation anxiety was both correlated negative dominant and negative submissive.(4) Family positive expressiveness, both dominant and submissive, was significant with child strategy recognition. However, family negative expressiveness didn’t find the same result. Child strategy generation was not related significant with family expressiveness, both positive expressiveness and negative expressiveness.(5) Except generalized anxiety was found related significantly with child strategy recognition of anger, the other dimensions of preschooler anxiety were not correlated with child strategy recognition. Neither child strategy generation of anger nor sadness was related significantly with preschooler anxiety.(6) The mediation role of child strategy recognition of anger was not significant between family dominant expressiveness and preschooler generalized anxiety; the moderator role of child strategy generation of sadness was significant between family dominant expressiveness and generalized anxiety.