The Correlational Research Of Parental Meta-emotion Philosophy, Family Environments And 5-6 Years Old Children’s Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation refers to a process of influencing the production, experience and expression of emotions by some certain strategies and means after the emotion arousal. Children’s ability of emotion regulation is affected by many factors in which the parents and family environments play a vital important role as the children’s important caregivers and environment. Previous studies have shown that the parental meta-emotion philosophy has a close relationship with children’s ability of emotion regulation and the family environments have an important effect on the early childhood socialization development. Therefore, in this research, we will explore the relationship between parental meta-emotion philosophy, the family environments and children’s ability of emotion regulation by questionnaire, experimentation and interviewing, so as to provide more reference and suggestions to the family caring for the developing of children’s emotional ability.92 children from a kindergarten of Shanghai completed the experimental task of emotion regulation, and their parents filled in the Parental Meta-emotion Philosophy Questionnaire and Family Environment Scale. Then 8 parents took part in the interviewing. The major finding of this study shows following:(1) Children aged 5-6 used more problem-solving strategy than other emotion regulation strategies in the frustration situation, and they rarely use the extreme strategies like vent. There is no significant difference between boys and girls when they face to a frustration situation.(2) Parents’emotion-coaching philosophy occupied a dominant position of all the 4 kinds of parental meta-emotion philosophy, and there is no remarkable difference between the remaining 3 kinds of parental meta-emotion philosophy. Parents’ education level has a significant impact on their parental meta-emotion philosophy.(3) Parents’occupations and the number of children in family respectively impact the degree of independence and conflict of the family environment. The teacher group has the lowest degree of family independence, and the staff of company group has the highest one. The contradictoriness of the families that have two children is higher than that of the families, which have only one child.(4) The parental meta-emotion philosophy has little predictability to the family environments, and only the emotion-dysfunction philosophy has an significant impact on the cohesion and contradictoriness of the family.(5) The dimensions of family environments have different effects on children’s emotion regulation:high cohesion and expressiveness showed positive impact on children’s emotion regulation, but high contradictoriness, independence and organization showed the negative influence.Finally, based on these results, we provide some relevant recommendations from both views of children’s need and how their parents could help.