Emotionally competent caregiving: Relations among teacher-child interaction patterns, teachers' beliefs about emotions, and children's emotional competence

The constellation of skills referred to as 'emotional competence' is comprised of the ability to appropriately express emotions, to understand one's own emotions and the emotions of others, and to regulate one's own emotions all three have lifelong implications. Children develop these competencies throughout early childhood, and the adults in a child's life act as emotion socialization agents by modeling appropriate (or inappropriate) emotions, responding to the child's emotional expression, and engaging in direct instruction concerning emotional experience. This study examined the influence of 44 preschool teachers' emotion socialization practices on aspects of 326 three- to six-year-old children's emotional competence, specifically their emotion knowledge and observed emotional behavior, in both Head Start and private child care centers. The teachers' modeling of positive and negative emotions, their contingent responses to the children's emotional expressions, and their direct instruction related to emotion understanding were measured by observations conducted in their classrooms, by a storytelling task, and by self-report. Children's emotion knowledge was individually measured using Denham's puppet task and instances of each child's expression of positive and negative emotions and other emotional behaviors were captured by a series of four 5-minute observations on different days and across different activities. Because information was collected on children who were nested within classrooms in which data was also collected on the teachers, hierarchical linear modeling was employed to analyze the data. We found that the majority of the variance in the children's emotion knowledge scores and observed emotional behavior was predicted by factors within rather than between the classrooms however, teachers' use of all three emotion socialization techniques---modeling, contingent responding, and teaching---did, in a number of instances, contribute to the prediction of the children's scores however, the nature of these associations was influenced by the children's age and their gender.