Emotional Competence During Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

Through childhood and adolescence, youngsters are learning how to express and regulate their myriad feelings and understand the emotions of self and others. They are acquiring emotional competence. Specifically, emotional competence is the ability to purposefully and fully experience and express a variety of emotions, regulate emotional expressiveness and experience when necessary, and understand the emotions of self and others. These skills, as they develop through childhood and adolescence, support successful resolution of developmental tasks centering upon social and academic success. Based on the nature and importance of children’s and youth’s emotional competence, this chapter’s structure is as follows. First, each component of emotional competence is discussed in turn; for each, its nature and development during each age period are discussed. Second, within each component and at each age level, evidence of relations with social competence (or lack of social competence as evidenced in behavior problems) and school success (where available) are detailed. Third, components of emotional competence also may work synergistically together to promote positive outcomes; this possibility is discussed next. Fourth, others’ promotion of these competencies will be considered. Parents’ and friends’ contributions to the development of emotional competence are discussed, along with the small literature on teachers’ socialization of emotional competence. Finally, conclusions and calls for future work sum up findings and issues put forward in the chapter.

Through childhood and adolescence, youngsters are learning how to express and regulate their myriad feelings and understand the emotions of self and others. They are acquiring emotional competence. Specifically, emotional competence is the ability to purposefully and fully experience and express a variety of emotions, regulate emotional expressiveness and experience when necessary, and understand the emotions of self and others (Denham, 1998; Saarni, 1999; see also Booker & Dunsmore, 2017; Camras & Halberstadt, 2017; Halberstadt, Denham, & Dunsmore, 2001 for the closely allied affective social competence model).

These emotional competence skills develop dramatically from early childhood through adolescence. During the preschool years, such skills help preschoolers to succeed at important developmental tasks of the period – maintaining positive emotional and behavioral engagement in the physical and social environment; making and maintaining relationships with other children and adults; and dealing with emotions in demanding group contexts where they are required to sit still, attend, follow directions, and navigate playing groups.

Emotions are ubiquitous in early childhood classrooms. To learn alongside and in collaboration with teachers and peers, young children must utilize their emotional competencies to facilitate learning (Denham, Brown, & Domitrovich, 2010). Such competencies are identified as among the most important abilities supporting early school success and the growth of even later academic competence (Denham, Bassett, Mincic, et al., 2012; Romano, Babchishin, Pagani, & Kohen, 2010). Thus, children, who understand and regulate emotions and are more emotionally positive when they enter school, are more likely to develop positive and supportive relationships with peers and teachers, participate more, and achieve at higher levels throughout their early years in school (Garner & Waajid, 2008; Graziano et al., 2007; Izard et al., 2001; Leerkes et al., 2008). Conversely, children who enter school with fewer emotional competence skills are more often rejected by peers, develop less supportive relationships with teachers, participate in and enjoy school less, achieve at lower levels, and are at risk for later behavior problems and school difficulties (Denham, Bassett, Mincic, et al., 2012, Denham, Bassett, Thayer, et al., 2012; Herndon, Bailey, Shewark, Denham, & Bassett, 2013). In short, emotional competence greases the cogs of a successful early school experience, with potentially long-lasting effects. One major longitudinal study has shown that prosocial behavior in kindergarten (including understanding and regulating emotion) was associated with young adult success in education, employment, mental health, and avoidance of crime and substance use, independent of child, family, and contextual factors (Jones, Greenberg, & Crowley, 2015).

During gradeschool and adolescence, emotional competence skills remain important while increasing in complexity; they continue to support successful negotiations of developmental tasks (Denham, Wyatt, Bassett, Echeverria, & Knox, 2009). For gradeschoolers, the key developmental tasks focus on interactions with peers – forming dyadic friendships, being liked by peers, and remitting from earlier, more developmentally typical, aggression. Successfully navigating these experiences is crucial to social success and subjective well-being in middle childhood and continued adjustment in school. By adolescence, developmental tasks include continuing, more intimate, relationships with peers and beginning romantic relationships; adolescents also are balancing relationships with parents and peers, as well as evidencing an increasing need for independence. Emotional competence supports successful resolution of these developmental tasks throughout older children’s and adolescents’ development and continues its association with school success (Miller-Slough & Dunsmore, 2016; Oberle, Schonert-Reichl, Hertzman, & Zumbo, 2014).

Educators and parents are becoming ever more aware of the importance of emotional competence and related issues (Bridgeland, Bruce, & Hariharan, 2013; Piotrkowski, Botsko, & Matthews, 2000; Wesley & Buysse, 2003). Teachers view children’s “readiness to learn” and “teachability” as marked by positive emotional expressiveness and ability to regulate emotions and behaviors (Rimm-Kaufman, Pianta, & Cox, 2000), as well as by emotional competence-related social strengths (Lin, Lawrence, & Gorrell, 2003). Further, children’s emotional competence is being recognized as important within the policy area. A content analysis shows that most US states have early childhood standards that include social and emotional competencies, albeit less systematically and with fewer indicators than cognitive skills (Dusenbury et al., 2015). Far fewer (about 1/3 of states) have standards through high school (CASEL, 2018b). Such integration into US state standards has increased examination of these competencies at the classroom level.

Furthermore, the USA has seen recent national legislation authorizing allocation of funds for technical assistance, training, and programming related to emotional competence, including the Every Student Succeeds Act; other legislation with ramifications for social-emotional learning is being introduced (CASEL, 2018a). Educators are being called to help children acquire these competencies by modeling genuine, appropriate emotions and responses to emotions, discussing emotions with children, and using positive emotions to support learning.

In summary, based on these assertions on the nature and importance of children’s and youth’s emotional competence, this chapter’s structure is as follows. First, each component of emotional competence is discussed in turn; for each, its nature and development during each age period are discussed. Then, within each component at each age level, evidence of relations with social competence (or lack of social competence as evidenced in behavior problems) and school success (where available) are detailed. The components of emotional competence also may work synergistically together to promote positive outcomes; this possibility is discussed next.

Third, others’ promotion of these competencies will be considered. Parents’ and friends’ contributions to the development of emotional competence are discussed, along with the small literature on teachers’ socialization of emotional competence. Finally, conclusions and calls for future work sum up what has been laid forth here.

Of note, culture, context, gender, and individual children’s temperaments are obvious potential boundary conditions – does emotional competence “work” similarly for all children and groups, in all settings, and do notions of promoting it come as “one size fits all”? The answer is undoubtedly “no.” These issues are critical, but because of space limitations their treatment here is modest; for deeper understanding, the reader is referred to Cole and Tan (2007); Denham, Warren, et al. (2011); Friedlmeier, Çorapçı, and Benga (2015); and Trommsdorff and Cole (2011) for cultural matters, Root and Denham (2010) for gender issues, and Calkins and Mackler (2011) for temperament.

Components of Emotional Competence: Emotional Expressiveness

Emotional expressiveness, including the experience of one’s own emotions and sending of emotional messages to others, is central to emotional competence. Emotions must be expressed in accordance with one’s goals and the social context. Children need to coordinate the goals of self and of others, experiencing and expressing emotions in a way that is advantageous to moment-to-moment interaction, and to relationships over time (Halberstadt et al., 2001).

What, more specifically, does the expression of emotions “do for” a child and his/her social group? Most importantly, emotions provide social information signaling whether the child or other people need to modify or continue their goal-directed behavior (Walle & Campos, 2012). An example is fear – if a child experiences fear when another child frequently hits/bullies him (whether in preschool or later), she/he may avoid the other child across shared settings and even ask mother or teacher for help. The experience of fear gives the child important information that affects subsequent behavior. Peers also benefit from witnessing other children’s expressions of emotion; for example, witnesses to a girl’s anger likely know from experience whether their most profitable response would be to fight back or to retreat.

Preschoolers learn to use emotional communication to express nonverbal messages about a social situation or relationship – for example, giving a hug to express the emotion of tenderness. They are expressing all the “basic” emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) and develop empathic involvement in others’ emotions, for example, kissing a baby sister when she falls down and bangs her knee. Further, they display complex social and self-conscious emotions, such as guilt, pride, shame, and contempt, in appropriate contexts. Finally, preschoolers begin to realize that a person may feel a certain way “on the inside” but show a different visible demeanor. They are learning that they can control overt expression of socially disapproved feelings, in favor of expressing more socially appropriate emotions – for example, one might feel afraid of an adult visitor, but show no emotion or even a slight smile (Denham, 1998).

With time and experience, older children learn that their goals are not always met by showing intense feelings; subtlety becomes the norm. Overt negative expressiveness and its intensity decline from preschool to the end of gradeschool (Murphy, Eisenberg, Fabes, Shepard, & Guthrie, 1999). “Letting it all hang out” is uniformly selected by elementary-aged children as the worst reaction to negative emotional experiences with peers (Saarni, 1997). Thus, these older children often express emotions less directly and vividly than before. Emotional expression depends with whom, and in what situation, they are interacting; display rules become important. For example, they regulate anger due to expected negative consequences (Zeman & Shipman, 1996). Although these “fronts” make children’s expressions less genuine, they also have positive aspects, such as saving face and surviving in a potentially hostile peer environment. Along with this “cool rule” that mandates more muted emotions within many settings (especially anger, gloating, envy; von Salisch, 2000), older children’s emotional messages can be more complex, with use of more blended signals, and better-differentiated expressions of social emotions.

Adolescents continue the trend of experiencing more positive than negative emotions (Malinen, Rönkä, Tolvanen, Sevón, & Jokinen, 2015); all may not be “sturm und drang.” They do shift toward expressing and experiencing more negative emotionality than previously (Frost, Hoyt, Chung, & Adams, 2015; Larson, Moneta, Richards, & Wilson, 2002); much of this negative emotion may be expressed with friends. They also report more intense emotions than their parents, with frequent ups and downs (Larson & Richards, 1994). Finally, moral and achievement-related emotions uptick during adolescence (Malti & Ongley, 2014; Pekrun, 2017).

Outcomes of Emotional Expressiveness

Preschoolers’ Social Competence

Enduring patterns of preschoolers’ emotional expressiveness become potent intrapersonal supports for, or roadblocks to, interacting with agemates. Thus, young children’s emotional styles contribute to their overall success in interacting with one’s peers: for example, an often sad or angry child is less able to see, let alone respond to, others’ emotional needs. Given this inability, her interactions may be less than effective; her emotions are hampering her social competence. It is no wonder when her peers flatly assert, “She hits. She bites. She kicked me this morning. I don’t like her.” Conversely, a generally happier preschooler may better afford to respond positively, socially, and effectively.

More specifically, positiveemotion is important in the initiation and regulation of social exchanges; sharing positive affect may further facilitate the formation of friendships and render one more likable. A child who displays more positive emotions manifested by smiling and laughing becomes an inviting beacon signaling “Come join me” to adults and classmates alike. Negativeaffect, especially anger, can be quite problematic in social interaction. Preschoolers who can balance their positive and negative emotions are seen by teachers and peers as more likeable, friendly, assertive, less aggressive, and less sad. They also respond more prosocially to peers’ emotions (e.g., Denham, McKinley, Couchoud, & Holt, 1990).

These outcomes of preschoolers’ emotional expressiveness patterns have more recently garnered much empirical support, corroborating and extending earlier findings. Positive emotional expressiveness during dyadic play was related to several indices of social competence, including peer acceptance, initiating peer interaction, receiving peers’ attention, and teachers’ ratings (Shin et al., 2011; see also Garner & Waajid, 2008). Hernández and colleagues (Hernández, Eisenberg, Valiente, Diaz, et al., 2017; Hernández, Eisenberg, Valiente, Spinrad, et al., 2017) showed that preschoolers’ positive emotion frequency was related to peer acceptance and lack of peer rejection, and that such positivity was especially predictive of peer acceptance for children who exhibited lower effortful control. Lindsey (2017) extended these findings even further, demonstrating that preschoolers who were observed sharing more mutual positive emotion with peers were better liked 1 year later. Adding further longitudinal findings, Morgan, Izard, and Hyde (2014) found that observed happiness and engagement in a happy task (blowing bubbles) predicted children’s positive social behavior 6 months later.

Regarding preschoolers’ social and self-evaluative emotions, empathetic concern, achievement pride and lack of shame at failure were related to amend-making; moral pride, achievement pride, and resilience to shame were related to spontaneous help (Ross, 2017). These positive functions social and self-evaluative emotions are important and require further study. However, context is always important. Five-year-olds’ empathic concern to mothers’ simulated positive and negative emotions were related to internalizing problems for those exposed to chronic maternal depression. In contrast, children’s empathy to mothers’ positive emotions was negatively related to internalizing for children nondepressed mothers. Empathy emanating from heightened sensitivity to the affective environment can be a protective regulatory strategy for children at risk, but at a cost – a “double-edged sword” (Thompson & Calkins, 1996).

Conversely, negative emotion (particularly anger) indexes concurrent social difficulty. Hernández, Eisenberg, Valiente, Diaz, et al. (2017) noted that kindergarten girls’ negative emotion was related to lessened peer acceptance. Kindergartners’ anger frequency was related to lower levels of peer acceptance and conflict with teachers (Hernández, Eisenberg, Valiente, Spinrad, et al., 2017), and anger intensity was related to more conflict and less closeness with teachers (see also Diaz et al., 2017). Anger’s contextual appropriateness may be especially important; context inappropriate anger was related to preschoolers’ self-rejection and loneliness, and negative peer and teacher social competence nominations (Locke, Davidson, Kalin, & Goldsmith, 2009).

Deleterious outcomes of anger also can extend across time. For example, toddlers’ observed and reported anger indirectly negatively predicted early gradeschool social competence (Taylor, Eisenberg, VanSchyndel, Eggum-Wilkens, & Spinrad, 2014). Slightly older children’s anger was negatively related to their later social competence (assertion, cooperation, and self-control; Chang, Shelleby, Cheong, & Shaw, 2012). Negative reactivity at age 6 predicted lower levels of prosocial behavior at age 7 (Laible et al., 2017). In short, enduring negative expressiveness can set about a cascade of equally negative social outcomes.

Behavior problems (e.g., aggression, hyperactivity, social withdrawal, anxiety) are also often related to emotional competence difficulties, such as a preponderance of negative expressiveness. For example, children’s dysregulated anger during a disappointing gift task was both concurrently and predictively associated with teachers’ ratings of externalizing behavior problems (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Terranova, & Kithakye, 2010). Further, kindergartners’ negative emotional expressiveness (anger, sadness, fear) was related to their behavior problems, particularly for those with lower effortful control, suggesting that dealing with intense, difficult emotions may be especially problematic for children with less developed self-regulation (Diaz et al., 2017). Corroborative results exist (Moran, Lengua, & Zalewski, 2013; Morris, Keane, Calkins, Shanahan, & O’Brien, 2014). Children observed as more fearful or frustration-prone, and lower in executive control, were rated by mothers as showing more externalizing problems, whereas those rated by mothers as more fearful and assessed as higher in delay ability were rated as showing fewer externalizing problems (Moran et al., 2013). Continuing broad consideration of self-regulation problems and negative expressiveness, young children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms showed more annoyance than those without such symptoms during a frustration task, even though both ADHD and non-ADHD children were indeed irritated by the task (Lugo-Candelas, Flegenheimer, McDermott, & Harvey, 2017).

In short, accumulating and expanding research notes the importance of both positive and negative emotional expressiveness for young children’s social competence with peers and teachers alike, as well as their behavior problems. The intimate connection between emotional competence and self-regulation and the relation among aspects of emotional competence (e.g., Giesbrecht, Miller, & Müller, 2010) are themes that will be revisited.

Preschoolers’ School Success

Attention is also being given to the contribution of emotional expressiveness styles to school success. Positive emotion may, for example, support and direct attention, facilitate information processing, and enhance both motivation and resilience (Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012). In alignment with this assertion, emotionally positive engagement with an examiner was related to literacy outcomes (Denham, Bassett, Sirotkin, & Zinsser, 2013). Positive emotional experience and expressiveness with adults signal enjoyment and motivation to learn to self and others. Elaborating on contexts where young children display positive emotions, Hernández et al. (2016) examined patterns of kindergartners’ emotional expressiveness during classroom free play, lunch and recess; positive emotions were positively related to concurrent academic success (i.e., literacy skills, achievement, and/or school engagement, with some relations context-specific), either directly or via positive relationships with teachers and peers. Perhaps surprisingly, even positive affect rated by mothers at infants’ age of 4 months and observed at 12 months was related to 4-year-olds’ school readiness (e.g., color and letter knowledge; Gartstein, Putnam, & Kliewer, 2016).

Conversely, Herndon et al. (2013) found that preschoolers’ negative emotionality (especially when dysregulated) was associated with lower levels of teachers’ later reports on positive engagement and independent motivation in learning, especially for boys. Similarly, Denham, Bassett, Thayer, et al. (2012) also showed that patterns of preschoolers’ negative expressiveness (predominantly anger) were related to lack of both current and later school adjustment, as well as kindergarten academic success (see also Diaz et al., 2017; Hernández et al., 2016). Examining more specific negative emotions, Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, and Swanson (2010) found that adults’ ratings of preschoolers’ sadness, anger, and shyness were negatively related to academic achievement.

At the same time, attention must be given to notions of culture, because this valuing of positive expressiveness over relative excess of negative expressiveness may be distinctly Western, in individualistic cultures where the focus is on the child’s autonomous success in the environment. In contrast, non-Western, relational cultures may value an altogether less expressive presentation of self, because of the goal of group harmony. In support of this possibility, Louie, Wang, Fung, and Lau (2015) found that for Korean and Asian American preschoolers, their sadness and happiness expressivity were both associated with negative peer or teacher outcomes. More value was perhaps placed on a calm demeanor for these children.

Gradeschoolers’ and Adolescents’ Social Competence, Behavior Problems, and School Success

Much less research has investigated these linkages in middle childhood. However, more studies are emerging. When children aged 54 months had emotional profiles characterized by higher negativity, especially for anger, they were rated as less socially competent both concurrently and predictively to gradeschool (Laible, Carlo, Murphy, Augustine, & Roesch, 2014). In another study, adolescents reporting higher state and trait anger showed more aggression and less prosocial behavior 2 years later (Mesurado, Vidal, & Mestre, 2018).

Some extant research for this age range focuses on behavior problems as an outcome, correlate, or moderator. For example, 8- to 14-year-olds’ positive emotions’ (i.e., happiness, excitement) intensity and frequency were negatively related to teacher and peer views of their externalizing behavior problems (i.e., aggression, hyperactivity, and delinquency; Kim, Walden, Harris, Karrass, & Catron, 2007). Conversely, elementary school children whose parents rated them higher on ADHD and anger were rated as more aggressive by peers, and those whose parents rated them higher on ADHD but lower on happiness/exuberance were more likely to be disliked by peers (Thorell, Sjöwall, Diamatopoulou, Rydell, & Bohlin, 2017).

Further, in their recent meta-analysis Mathews, Koehn, Abtahi, and Kerns (2016) also confirmed that children and adolescents experiencing anxiety, assessed in several ways, were “less effective at physically and verbally expressing emotions” (p. 169; see also Carthy, Horesh, Apter, Edge, & Gross, 2010; Hurrell, Hudson, & Schniering, 2015). Perhaps fearfulness renders it more difficult for these children to confidently express their other emotions.

Finally, recent work by Ansary, McMahon, and Luthar (2017) has continued to add breadth and depth to understanding of emotional expressiveness in adolescents, especially those with behavior problems. In their study, peer reports of emotion indicated that youth in an internalizing problem cluster were more shy/anxious and sad than others; those in the externalizing cluster were more irritable. This clear connection between behavior problems and emotional expressiveness extended to school outcomes: sixth graders in both the internalizing and externalizing clusters were less adjusted to the classroom (frustration tolerance, task orientation) and those in the externalizing cluster got lower grades.

Summary of Outcomes of Emotional Expressiveness

In short, preschoolers’ expression of emotions, especially a positive emotional style, appears central to young children’s concurrent and later positive outcomes in both social and academic realms. Overall, the smaller body of research on older children’s and adolescents’ expressiveness echoes that finding and situates expressiveness within the context of behavior problems. Educators could work to promote students’ positive emotion and ability to deal with negative emotions and their source.

Components of Emotional Competence: Emotion Regulation

Becoming more independent, especially beginning to attend preschool or childcare, is an important transition that taxes young children’s emotion regulatory skills. Initiating, maintaining, and negotiating play, earning acceptance, resolving conflicts, taking turns, and sitting still, all require preschoolers to “keep the lid on.” Yet preschoolers’ newly important peers are not very able to aid others’ emotion regulation, and the social cost of emotional dysregulation is high with teachers, parents, and peers. Some organized emotional gatekeeper must be cultivated.

Thus, when intensity, duration, or other parameters of the experience and expression of emotion are “too much” or “too little” to meet goals and expectations of the child and/or social partners, emotion regulation is needed (Thompson, 1994). Negative or positive emotions can need regulating, when they threaten to overwhelm or need to be amplified. Children learn to retain or enhance those emotions that are relevant and helpful, to attenuate those that are relevant but not helpful, and to dampen those that are irrelevant; these skills help them to experience more well-being and maintain satisfying relationships with others. For example, a little boy may know that showing too much anger will hurt one friend’s feelings but showing too little angry bravado with another (who is bullying) could make him more of a target.

Early in the preschool period, much of this self-management is biobehavioral (e.g., thumbsucking) and often supported by adults; for example, even though very upset when a younger playmate grabs all the toys, one can use the caregiver’s assistance instead of immediately resorting to aggression. As children progress through this period, they become able to regulate their emotions more independently, because of increased cognitive ability and voluntary control of both their attention and their emotionality.

More specifically, regulation of emotion becomes more volitional, implying that young children become able to purposefully modify spontaneous expressions of experienced emotions, via amplification, minimization, neutralization, masking, or simulation of expressions, resulting in a disjunction between expression and experience of emotion (Kromm, Färber, & Holodynski, 2015); volitional emotion regulation is seen to increase from preschool to gradeschool. Such volitional, or reflective, emotion regulation becomes possible as children acquire the cognitive self-regulation skills needed to direct attention to the problem, create plans, control prepotent responses that would foil the plans, and carry them out (Holodynski, Seeger, Kortas-Hartmann, & Wörmann, 2013; see also Hudson & Jacques, 2014, as well as Orta, Çorapçı, Yagmurlu, & Aksan, 2013, who corroborate the role of self-regulation in late preschoolers’ emerging emotion regulation and dysregulation). Moreover, increasing language skills aid in distancing from emotions, and “mental time travel” (Holodynski et al., 2013, p. 31) allows children to conceive of the very plans that will lead to goal attainment. Finally, children learn a menu of strategies related to the various goals they may plan to attain. These skills allow for transitioning from co-regulation with adults to self-regulation of emotions.

Thus, strategies used in emotion regulation are very important. Perhaps, along with the skills of reflective emotion regulation, converging social and cognitive pressures concomitant with learning and interacting in groups motivate preschoolers gradually to use specific emotion regulation strategies – problem-solving, support-seeking, distancing, internalizing, externalizing, distraction, reframing or redefining the problem, cognitive “blunting,” and denial. Although preschoolers are capable of the more cognitive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., reframing and redefining, “thinking about something else”), they more often use simpler means, particularly venting, distraction, and support-seeking (López-Pérez, Gummerum, Wilson, & Dellaria, 2017). As well, in agreement with Holodynski et al. (2013), more advanced language may support emotion regulation efforts, enabling children to successfully ask for help and use creative means to redirect attention; young children with better language skills as toddlers expressed less intense anger as 4-year-olds (Roben, Cole, & Armstrong, 2013).

Finally, some investigators are beginning to successfully address Thompson’s view of emotion regulation as a process as well as an outcome, and to examine developmental changes in the temporal dynamics of emotion regulatory experiences (Cole, 2014). Cole, Bendezú, Ram, and Chow (2017) have shown that when 3-year-olds were prevented from opening a desirable gift (and, of course, had a high prepotent response of wanting the gift and frustration at being blocked), they engaged in successful, mature executive process-driven emotion regulatory strategy usage, such as focused distraction. As the 8-min task progressed, however, their strategy effectiveness diminished, especially for children with externalizing behavior problems.

In the same vein, but examining developmental change, Morales et al. (2018) found that 5-year-olds showed more efficient fear-related regulation than at 2 years old. Five-year-olds more quickly deployed regulatory strategies. However, children at both ages used strategies throughout visits from a potentially fear-inducing clown or “lion.” Thus, strategies (whether one would consider them “mature” or not; this study collapsed across this dimension) are used in similar quantity and potency at both ages. Examination of such temporal dynamics has the potential to add immeasurably to our understanding of emotion regulation and its intimate pairing with emotional expression and experience; though such research is complex to undertake, investigators should take up the challenge to further this exploration.

With increasing age after preschool, socialization messages of others, as well as even more sophisticated cognitive abilities (e.g., abilities to appraise the controllability of emotional experience, intentionally shift thoughts, self-comfort through subvocal reassurance, or flexibly examine different aspects of situations), motivate and allow for more advanced emotion regulation in accordance with the “cool rule” (von Salisch, 2000). Thus, gradeschoolers are increasingly able to independently use more cognitively focused and situationally targeted strategies to regulate emotion, such as situation selection, modification, and reappraisal. At the same time, they endorse distancing from uncontrollable stressors and rely less on support-seeking (López-Pérez et al., 2017; Sala, Pons, & Molina, 2014; von Salisch, 2008).

Further, gradeschoolers are coming to understand that some strategies work for specific emotions. Waters and Thompson (2014) found that, although choices of strategies were related across anger- and sadness-eliciting situations, gradeschoolers most highly endorsed problem-solving as effective for anger and seeking adult support and venting as effective for sadness. Nine-year-olds rated ineffective strategies (i.e., venting and doing nothing) less highly than 6-year-olds. Wan and Savina (2016) also found that both Chinese and American gradeschoolers considered it profitable to avoid an angry situation or talk to someone, but to practice deep breathing for sadness. Thus, older children are aware of the strategies at their command and consider their likelihood of success in different contexts.

During adolescence, emotion regulation can become more complicated. Although building upon the foundation of emotion regulation set in earlier years, the challenges of changing bodies, minds and social relationships, can render it more difficult to deal with feelings (Cole, 2014). The social context is important for adolescents’ emotion regulation; the role of parents and friends will be examined within the consideration of socialization of emotion.

Outcomes of Emotion Regulation and Dysregulation

Preschoolers’ Social Competence and Behavior Problems

Maternal and teacher reports of effective emotion regulatory coping are associated with success with peers and overall social effectiveness during the preschool years (Denham, Blair, Schmidt, & DeMulder, 2002; Di Maggio, Zappulla, & Pace, 2016; Orta et al., 2013; Ren, Wyver, Rattanasone, & Demuth, 2016; Spritz, Sandberg, Maher, & Zajdel, 2010; Son & Chang, 2018). In fact, there are cascading and reciprocal relations between emotion regulation and aspects of social competence from age 5 to 10; age 5 emotion regulation five predicted age 7 social competence, which then predicted age 10 peer acceptance, friendship quality, and emotion regulation (Blair et al., 2015).

Preschoolers’ emotion regulation also has been measured observationally, sometimes across longitudinal periods. Five-year-olds’ active, not passive or disruptive, emotion regulation when faced with a disappointing gift predicted socially competent peer play at age 7 (Penela, Walker, Degnan, Fox, & Henderson, 2015); similar findings have been obtained, with positive reactions to a disappointing gift predicting older preschoolers’ peer status (Nakamichi, 2017).

Examining preschoolers’ behavioral and physiological emotion regulation together also has been profitable. For example, negative emotion and disengagement in a distress task predicted negative social behavior 6 months later, and marginally negatively predicted positive social behavior (Morgan et al., 2014). Greater physiological reactivity during the distress task (assessed by heart reactivity) was related to more negative social behavior, but greater physiological recovery from the distress task was related to more positive social behavior. In contrast, greater physiological recovery from the exuberance task predicted less positive social behavior. The authors suggested that effective regulation at this age may consist of maintaining positive emotions and decreasing negative arousal; the valence of the experience matters.

Despite the growth demonstrated in these studies, emotion regulatory failure still occurs throughout the preschool period; such emotion dysregulation or lack of positive emotion regulatory strategy usage is often associated with young children’s concurrent or later difficulties with aggression, other externalizing behavior and internalizing behavior, and compromised social competence (Chang et al., 2012; Crespo, Trentacosta, Aikins, & Wargo-Aikins, 2017; Di Maggio et al., 2016; Miller, Gouley, Seifer, Dickstein, & Shields, 2004; Ren et al., 2016). Moreover, examining longitudinal change, Cohen and Mendez (2009) found that for low SES African American preschoolers, emotional lability in the fall of an academic year was associated with consistently maladaptive and declining social competence later in the year.

More specifically, use of maladaptive emotion regulatory strategies can be associated with behavioral difficulties. For example, preschoolers rated as anxious by their parents were reported as using more venting strategies both generally and in emotionally difficult situations, and young children with ADHD symptoms evidenced difficulties using regulation strategies during a frustration task (Lugo-Candelas et al., 2017; Yeo, Frydenberg, Northam, & Deans, 2014). Clearly emotional dysregulation, variously considered, already constitutes a risk factor.

Preschoolers’ School Success

As already noted, demands of the new preschool environment can also be emotionally challenging and call for emotion regulation. Thus, emotion regulation is also related to classroom adjustment, academic success, and other indices of school readiness (Bierman, Nix, Greenberg, Blair, & Domitrovich, 2008; Brophy-Herb, Zajicek-Farber, Bocknek, McKelvey, & Stansbury, 2013). Children less able to deal with negative emotions may not have personal resources to focus on learning, whereas those who can maintain a positive emotional tone might be able to remain positively engaged with classroom tasks (Denham et al., 2013; Graziano, Reavis, Keane, & Calkins, 2007; Herndon et al., 2013; Miller, Seifer, Stroud, Sheinkopf, & Dickstein, 2006; Shields et al., 2001; Trentacosta & Izard, 2007).

Gradeschoolers’ and Adolescents’ Social Competence, Behavior Problems, and School Success

The ability to regulate emotions in an age-appropriate manner continues to relate concurrently or predictively with older children’s social competence. For example, first grade teacher-rated emotion regulation predicted second grade peer preference (Kam et al., 2011). As in early childhood, emotion regulation also is related to or predictive of behavior problems; early gradeschoolers’ emotion regulation and lack of lability/negativity was related to parental report of fewer behavior problems (Duncombe, Havighurst, Holland, & Frankling, 2013). Further, the inability to manage intense emotions in third grade predicted symptoms of anxiety in fifth grade (Brumariu & Kerns, 2013). Complementarily, dysregulated anger (high anger reactivity paired with low attentional control) during preschool predicted 10-year-olds’ externalizing problems, controlling for preschool externalizing (Morris et al., 2014).

Regarding adolescents, Laible, Carlo, Panfile, Eye, and Parker (2010) employed a person-centered approach to isolate groups differing on self-reports of negative emotional emotionality (i.e., their experience of emotion) and emotion regulation. Teens characterized by high negativity and low emotion regulation showed elevations of negative behaviors (e.g., aggression, personal distress at others’ plights, and negative expressiveness). Youth low on negative emotionality but high in regulation reported the least negative behavior; those moderate on both dimensions, interestingly, reported the most positive social behaviors.

Contextualizing adolescents’ emotion regulation, one study focused on sixth to 11th graders’ reactivity to conflict in the family (Cook, Buehler, & Blair, 2013). Early adolescents’ emotional reactivity to earlier interparental conflict (e.g., “when my parents argue I can’t calm myself down”), controlling for temperamental negativity, predicted tenth graders’ emotional reactivity in response to conflict with close friends (e.g., “I feel sad,” and “I can’t stop thinking about the problem”). In turn, emotional reactivity to close friend conflict predicted 11th graders’ emotional reactivity to romantic partner conflict, which also was associated with the intensity of that conflict. Difficulty dealing with the emotional aspect of conflicts in the important relationships continuing or emerging in adolescence showed continuity, leading to difficulty with major social developmental tasks of the period.

Turning to even more negative adolescent outcomes, several studies have shown that difficulties with emotion regulation are associated with developing psychopathology, particularly depression and anxiety. For example, of seventh graders who reported on their emotions via an experience sampling method, those who reported less effective regulation of more intense, labile emotions also reported more depressive symptoms (Silk, Steinberg, & Morris, 2003). Using the ineffective regulatory strategies of denial or rumination also related to depressive symptoms.

Continuing to examine the relation of emotion regulation and adolescent depression, adolescents in Fussner, Luebbe, and Bell’s (2015) study performed two interaction tasks with their parents, first a positive one in which the family perceived themselves to be winning a trivia game, and then a more negatively-toned experience of discussing problem issues together. The adolescents’ positive emotion was observed and self-reported. Youth who could not maintain positive emotion, or up-regulate during the second task, showed higher self-reports of depression. This emphasis on dealing with positive emotion is somewhat unique and would seem important to the study of adolescent depression (see also Davis & Suveg, 2014).

Moreover, new emotion regulation-related constructs become important at these ages: awareness of one’s emotions, acceptance of one’s emotions, and ability to maintain goal-directed behavior, along with more adult emotion regulation strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal and suppression of emotion. Such aspects of emotion regulation were negatively related to female adolescents’ depression (Moradi Siah Afshadi, Amiri, & Molavi, 2017). Further, aspects of emotion regulation can work together: Girls’ emotional awareness was associated with lower levels of depression via cognitive reappraisal (Eastabrook, Flynn, & Hollenstein, 2014).

Regarding other aspects of emerging psychopathology, anxious gradeschoolers and youth have reported less effective regulation of sadness and anger, as well as more dysregulation of both emotions (Hurrell, Houwing, & Hudson, 2017; Hurrell et al., 2015). More specifically, in their recent meta-analysis Mathews et al. (2016; see also Hurrell et al., 2015, 2017) confirmed that youth experiencing anxiety were less aware and accepting of their own emotions. Lack of awareness and acceptance of one’s emotions, and inability to maintain goal-directed behavior were variously related to social, physical, and separation anxiety for 8- to 16-year-olds, both at the time and 3 years later (Schneider, Arch, Landy, & Hankin, 2018; see also Kranzler et al., 2016). Sendzik, Schäfer, Samson, Naumann, and Tuschen-Caffier (2017) also uncovered links from lack of awareness to depression as well as anxiety, especially for 8- to 12-year-olds.

Examining specific emotion regulatory strategies, Mathews et al. (2016) showed that anxious youth most utilize support-seeking and avoidant emotion regulation strategies (usually more common in early childhood), as well as maladaptive rumination and catastrophizing. They did not use reappraisal in an experimental exposure to threatening images or report using it as a strategy in their everyday life (Carthy et al., 2010). In sum, anxious adolescents’ emotion regulatory strategies are less than optimal, perhaps perpetuating their discomfort.

Further, young adolescents’ self-reports of “emotional self-control” and dysregulation were associated with academic involvement and alienation, negative life events, tolerance of deviance, perceived harm and risk of substance use, and positive prototypes of substance users in expected directions, and both directly and indirectly then related to externalizing and internalizing problems and positive well-being (Wills, Simons, Sussman, & Knight, 2016). Similarly, difficulties with emotion regulation, especially anger awareness and discomfort with emotional expression, have been both concurrently and longitudinally with adolescents’ risky behavior, including hard drug use and number of sexual partners, as well as overall externalizing and internalizing behavior problems (Hessler & Katz, 2010). These studies mark the extreme negative outcomes of dysregulation for adolescents.

Few studies examine adolescents’ emotion regulation and their academic success directly. However, sixth graders’ social-emotional skills, including frustration tolerance, were related to seventh graders’ mathematics and reading achievement (Oberle et al., 2014). Further, Ivcevic and Brackett (2014) have shown that skills in overcoming frustration and modulating emotional reactions were related to adolescents’ academic recognitions, academic honors, grades, and satisfaction with school (see also Jones et al., 2015). Emotional intelligence assessment (including management of emotions of self and other) was also related to fifth- and sixth graders’ language arts grades (Rivers et al., 2012; see also Costa & Faria, 2015). More research in this area is warranted.

Summary of Outcomes for Emotion Regulation

In summary, emotion regulation also supports social and school success across preschool through adolescence, as well as serving a protective function against behavior problems. Along with and closely related to emotional expressiveness (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004), this aspect of emotional competence should be a central focus of support from parents and educators. Thus, educators could promote emotion regulation, in the service of both social competence and amelioration of problem behaviors.

Components of Emotional Competence: Emotion Knowledge

Children are interested in emotions as early as age 2 years. In spontaneous conversations, even young children talk about and reflect upon their own and others’ feelings and discuss causes and consequences of their own and others’ emotional experiences and expressiveness (Dunn, 1994). Emotion knowledge yields information about emotional expressions and experience in self and others, as well as about environmental events. It conveys crucial interpersonal information, guiding interaction. Inability to interpret emotions can make home, neighborhood, and classroom confusing places, hindering social and academic adjustment.

What are the components of emotion knowledge for children and adolescents? Early emotion knowledge is conceived of as understanding expressions and situations of emotion, whether typical or atypical (Bassett, Denham, Mincic, & Graling, 2012; Sette, Bassett, Baumgardner, & Denham, 2015; Pons, Harris, & de Rosnay, 2004). Even 2-year-olds begin to understand emotions in this manner (Fernández-Sánchez, Quintanilla, & Giménez-Dasí, 2015).

Thus, most preschoolers can infer basic emotions from expressions or situations. They tend to have a better understanding of happy situations compared to those that evoke negative emotions. They gradually come to differentiate among the negative emotions of self and other-for example, realizing that one feels more sad than angry, when receiving “time out” from one’s preschool teacher. They also become increasingly capable of using emotion language – for example, reminiscing about family sadness when a pet died.

Furthermore, young children begin to identify other peoples’ emotions even when they may differ from their own – for example, knowing that father’s smile as he comes into the house means he too smells the aroma of sauerkraut. Toward the end of this period, they begin to comprehend complex dimensions of emotional experiences, such as the possibility of simultaneous emotions, and that emotions may wane with time. In sum, preschoolers across many cultures are becoming able to discern their own and others’ emotional states, talk about them rather fluently, empathize with others’ emotions, and begin to understand dissemblance (Denham, 1998; Pons et al., 2004; Sawada, 1997; von Salisch & Janke, 2010).

As children mature, they acquire more detailed and sophisticated conceptions of emotions. Intricate emotion knowledge blossoms as gradeschoolers first improve markedly in understanding that different events elicit different emotions in different people, and that enduring patterns of personality affect individuals’ emotional reactions. Then, older children also come to understand more mental aspects of emotions, such as differing desires and beliefs can engender different emotions, and that emotions can be hidden (along with the display rules governing when to hide them). Finally, they better understand how to regulate emotions, that emotions may be mixed/multiple, that time changes emotions, and the elicitation of moral emotions (e.g, Zajdel, Bloom, Fireman, & Larsen, 2013). Pons et al. (2004) have shown that these developmental phases exist, cohere, and are hierarchical, building upon one another, with emotion knowledge increasing with age.

Further, stable individual differences have been noted (Pons & Harris, 2005; see Castro, Halberstadt, & Garrett-Peters, 2016, for a similar three-factor structure in third graders’ emotion knowledge). It should be noted, however, that the validity of such specific elements of emotion knowledge has not been extended to adolescence.

Outcomes of Emotion Knowledge or Its Lack

Preschoolers’ Social Competence and Behavior Problems

Although there are developmental progressions in the various aspects of emotion knowledge, there also are marked individual differences in these developments. Preschoolers who apply their more substantial emotion knowledge in emotionally charged situations have contemporaneous and later advantages in peer interaction; they are more prosocially responsive to their peers, and rated as more socially skilled by teachers, and more likable by their peers (Alonso-Alberca et al., 2012; Castro et al., 2016; Deneault & Ricard, 2013; Denham et al., 2003; Denham et al., 1990; Parker, Mathis, & Kupersmidt, 2013; Torres, Domitrovich, & Bierman, 2015; Izard et al., 2001; Garner & Waajid, 2008, 2012; Sette et al., 2015). Moderators of this central finding should be examined. For example, Kuhnert, Begeer, Fink, and de Rosnay (2017) found emotion knowledge predicted later prosocial behavior only for girls aged 5–7 years.

Further, investigating more specialized social competence, Liao, Li, and Su (2014) found that young children’s emotion recognition was associated with their tendency to predict reconciliation of characters in aggression stories. Relatedly, preschoolers’ emotion knowledge was related to peer nominations of their taking a defender role in conflict (Camodeca & Coppola, 2016). Important buffers against aggression were supported by emotion knowledge.

Why is this general link found so robustly across decades of study and samples differing slightly in age and in socioeconomic makeup? The power of emotion knowledge appears substantial. It allows a preschooler to react appropriately to others, whether calmly or sympathetically, bolstering social relationships. Interactions with an emotionally knowledgeable agemate would likely be viewed as satisfying, rendering one more likable; for instance, emotion knowledge may allow the preschooler to interact more successfully when a friend gets angry, and talking about one’s own emotions can facilitate negotiating disputes with friends. Similarly, teachers are likely attuned to behavioral evidence of such emotion knowledge – the use of emotion language, the sympathetic reaction, and to evaluate it positively.

Conversely, lack of emotion knowledge puts the preschooler at risk for aggression (Denham, Blair, et al., 2002; Di Maggio et al., 2016; Parker et al., 2013; Ren et al., 2016; Woods, Menna, & McAndrew, 2017) and internalizing issues, such as shyness, loneliness and peer victimization (Di Maggio et al., 2016; Heinze, Miller, Seifer, Dickstein, & Locke, 2015; Sette, Baumgartner, Laghi, & Coplan, 2016). In some cases, there is moderation by gender; for example, misattributing anger when other emotions were more correct was related to peer rejection and boys’ aggression (Schultz, Izard, & Ackerman, 2000).

Other reports have noted a relation between deficits in emotion knowledge and ADHD diagnoses (Chronaki et al., 2015; Lugo-Candelas et al., 2017; Rodrigo-Ruiz, Perez-Gonzalez, & Cejudo, 2017). Importantly, relations between behavior problems and emotion knowledge are likely to be bidirectional. In one study, early hyperactivity contributed to emotion recognition problems, which then contributed to internalizing behavior problems (Castro, Cooke, Halberstadt, & Garrett-Peters, 2018; see also Strand, Barbosa-Leiker, Arellano Piedra, & Downs, 2015; Székely et al., 2014).

As an overall summary, Trentacosta and Fine’s (2010) meta-analysis emphasized these relations of emotion knowledge to both social competence and externalizing/internalizing behavior problems. In terms of its relation with social competence, findings were consistent across nonclinical and clinical samples, ages three to 11 years, ethnicity, SES, emotion knowledge measure, social competence source/reporter, and concurrent/longitudinal association. Regarding externalizing and internalizing problems, findings were consistent across similar potential moderators. Such effects are also found cross-nationally (e.g., Lee, Eoh, Jeong, & Park, 2017).

Preschoolers’ School Success

Increasingly, researchers also are confirming a link between early academic success and young children’s emotion knowledge (Blankson et al., 2017; Garner & Waajid, 2008, 2012; Izard et al., 2001; Leerkes, Paradise, O’Brien, Calkins, & Lange, 2008; Torres et al., 2015). For example, emotion knowledge – but not emotion regulation – was related to preschoolers’ pre-academic achievement (Leerkes et al., 2008; see also Garner & Waajid, 2008). Denham and colleagues’ work (Bassett et al., 2012; Curby et al., 2015; Denham, Bassett, Mincic, et al., 2012; Denham, Bassett, Thayer, et al., 2012) also showed that emotion knowledge predicts later preschool and kindergarten school adjustment and academic success, both directly and indirectly. Importantly, growth in emotion knowledge predicted kindergarten reading achievement and engagement in school (Nix, Bierman, Domitrovich, & Gill, 2013; see also Torres et al., 2015).

These findings on preschool emotion knowledge’s contribution to school success extend even further in time. Rhoades, Warren, Domitrovich, and Greenberg (2011) found that preschool emotion knowledge predicted first grade academic achievement, mediated by kindergarten attentional abilities. Similarly, Izard and colleagues have found evidence of a link between emotion knowledge and even later academic success in elementary school (Izard, 2002; Izard et al., 2001). Thus, children’s ability to understand emotions, especially in context, plays an important role in their concurrent and later academic success. In fact, a recent series of meta-analyses (Voltmer & von Salisch, 2017) shows that emotion knowledge in preschoolers and gradeschoolers is related to academic achievement, school adjustment, and peer acceptance.

Like that with social competence, the link with school success bears consideration. Why would emotion knowledge contribute to school success? First, school success – being able to attend and cooperate, feeling good about school, remaining nonaggressive, and focusing on tasks – is carried out in a very social world. Understanding the potential barrage of one’s own and others’ emotions in the preschool classroom can make these socially-centered tasks easier, in that interactions are smoother and more personal resources are left to focus on more cognitive tasks.

Possible Contributors to Early Emotion Knowledge

Emotion knowledge are important for social competence, avoidance of behavior problems, and school success. But there also seem to be important potential foundations (or at least strong correlates) of such knowledge. For example, self-regulation, which has already been implicated here for its connection to emotional expressiveness and emotion regulation, quite often is related to emotion knowledge (Carlson & Wang, 2007; Denham, Bassett, Zinsser, & Wyatt, 2014; Gündüz, Yagmurlu, & Harma, 2015; Klein et al., 2018; Mann, Hund, Hesson-McInnis, & Roman, 2017; Martins, Osório, Veríssimo, & Martins, 2016; von Salisch, Haenel, & Denham, 2015; von Salisch, Haenel, & Freund, 2013).

Thus, both “cool” (e.g., inhibitory control, attention focusing, and shifting) and “hot” (e.g., delay of gratification) aspects of self-regulation may be important supports for the acquisition of emotion knowledge, at least contemporaneously. It is not hard to picture that inhibiting prepotent responses in situations where tasks are difficult or activate emotions, and shifting attention to emotional aspects of the situation, might allow one mental space to perceive one’s own or others’ emotions. However, consideration of emotion knowledge predicting aspects of self-regulation rather than the reverse should be considered. For example, preschoolers’ emotion knowledge and a composite of working memory and inhibitory control were contemporaneously related at age 3, but each predicted the other between ages three and four (Rhoades et al., 2011; see also Ferrier, Karalus, Denham, & Bassett, 2018).

Verbal ability, especially receptive language, also has been implicated as related to young children’s emotion knowledge. Recent research continues to corroborate the emotion knowledge/language association (e.g., Martin, Williamson, Kurtz-Nelson, & Boekamp, 2015; Martins et al., 2016; Seidenfeld, Johnson, Cavadel, & Izard, 2014). In fact, Beck, Kumschick, Eid, and Klann-Delius (2012) extended this relation to examine various age-appropriate aspects of gradeschoolers’ emotion knowledge (e.g., knowledge of mixed emotions, expressive emotion vocabulary, situation knowledge including questions about bodily sensations and thoughts during emotions) and language/literacy (e.g., narrative structure, reading comprehension). The two constructs created well-fitting latent variables that nonetheless were so highly correlated as to be better explained by a common factor. As noted by Martin et al., “Children who present with both language difficulties and behavioral disruption may be particularly vulnerable to emotion processing errors, as well as to missed opportunities to engage in social interactions and conversations that might support their growth in this area” (p. 33). The same could be said for children exhibiting difficulties with self-regulation; it is time to attend to these issues.

Gradeschoolers’ and Adolescents’ Social Competence, Behavior Problems, and School Success

Although emotion knowledge can be assessed in middle childhood (e.g., aspects of emotion knowledge referring to mixed or hidden emotion), there are few studies involving it and only two were found regarding adolescents. Specifically, Kuhnert et al. (2017) showed that 7-year-old girls’ prosocial behavior observed during triadic observations was related to their emotion knowledge; Garrett-Peters, Castro, and Halberstadt (2017) demonstrated that gradeschoolers’ emotion knowledge was related to teacher ratings of classroom adjustment (i.e., cooperation, assertion, self-control, lack of behavior problems). Further, Öztürk Samur (2015) found positive relations between age-appropriate aspects of emotion knowledge and lack of externalizing behaviors in Turkish 6- and 7-year-olds.

Sometimes emotion knowledge is aggregated with related constructs given investigators’ theoretical foundations and empirical goals. For example, emotion knowledge, as a high-loading aspect of a social-emotional comprehension factor, was associated with teacher reports of greater social skills and fewer behavior problems for two samples of gradeschool children (McKown, Russo-Ponsaran, Allen, Johnson, & Warren-Khot, 2016). Early adolescents’ emotional intelligence score (which included aspects of emotion knowledge and regulation) was associated with teachers’ ratings of fewer behavior problems, more adaptive behavior, and better achievement in language arts, mathematics, and reading, as well as work habits (Rivers et al., 2012). In the only other study found that involved adolescents, Moradi Siah Afshadi et al. (2017) found that knowledge of negative and positive emotions was related to lessened incidence of depression for adolescent females.

Summary of Outcomes of Emotion Knowledge

Taken together, these findings suggest that from preschool to adolescence, the ability to understand emotions facilitates positive social interactions, as well as school success, and that a deficit in this ability can contribute to behavioral and learning problems. Again, this component of emotional competence begs for deeper scrutiny by educators, and more research and better assessment for later ages are needed.

Pathways Among Components of Emotional Competence

As important as these relations are between each component of emotional competence and social competence or school success, these components also are likely to support one another as an interrelated network (Eisenberg, Sadovsky, & Spinrad, 2005). In fact, all aspects of emotional competence work together to promote children’s school success (Denham, Bassett, Mincic, et al., 2012). Much more targeted research in this area, or easily culled results, has been done involving preschoolers, so that is the focus of the following. However, it is likely that these components of emotional competence are interrelated for older children as well.

As Cole et al. (2004) theorized and Denham, Bassett, Mincic, et al. (2012) demonstrated, emotion regulation and expressiveness often operate in concert. Children with who experience intense negative emotions and are unable to regulate their expressions of such emotion, are especially likely to suffer difficulties in social relationships (Contreras, Kerns, Weimer, Gentzler, & Tomich, 2000). In contrast, however, even children who are high in negative emotionality are buffered from peer status problems by good emotion regulation skills, which parents and caregivers can teach them (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 1997). Emotion knowledge also may support positive, regulated emotional expressiveness, especially in predicting social competence and school success (Denham, Bassett, Thayer, et al., 2012; Denham, Blair, et al., 2002; Di Maggio et al., 2016).

In Denham and colleagues’ study (Denham, Bassett, Mincic, et al., 2012), all these assertions were corroborated in person-centered analyses: 4-year-olds with more positive profiles of emotional expressiveness, emotion regulation, and emotion knowledge (along with more positive self-regulation and social problem-solving) did indeed show greater school success as evaluated later that school year and in kindergarten. The children with lower emotion knowledge, as well as less positive emotional expressiveness and emotion regulation abilities, were at risk for deficits in later school success; this group was comprised of more boys and children living in poverty than the other two groups. Person-centered views of emotional competence can be useful in determining the need to address these interconnected abilities in the classroom.

Indirect, mediational pathways are also possible; emotional competencies considered more foundational might have, along with their direct effects, indirect contributions to classroom adjustment and academic readiness via more overt behaviors. In one of the few studies examining how aspects of emotional competence may mediate one another in contributing to early school success, Denham, Bassett, Zinsser, and Wyatt (2014) found that emotionally negative/aggressive behavior mediated relations between aspects of emotion knowledge and both concurrent and later school adjustment. Further, emotion knowledge was related to observed emotion regulation and thence to classroom adjustment (see also the indirect relation of emotion knowledge deficits to teacher-reported anger/aggression in Di Maggio et al., 2016).

Further, it can be important to demonstrate relations among the aspects of emotional competence as outcomes in their own right. In a study of tantrums, preschoolers’ self-reports of general sadness/distress were related to parents’ reports of their distress in tantrums, via their lack of emotion knowledge. Parent reports of children’s anger reactivity also were related to their anger in tantrums, mediated by general anger dysregulation. Finally, parents’ report of the children’s sadness/distress reactivity was associated with tantrum distress, mediated both by use of venting as means of coping with emotions and by dysregulated sadness (Giesbrecht et al., 2010). Thus, expressivity, emotion regulation, and emotion knowledge all showed relations. As another example, Lindsey (2017) noted the relation between young children’s mutual positive affect and emotion knowledge. Finally, Hudson and Jacques (2014) showed that understanding emotions, in general, and display rules, in particular, contributed to 5- to 7-year-olds’ abilities to aspects of emotion regulation during a disappointing gift task.

Summary of Relations Among Components of Emotional Competence

In sum, emotional competence components do not operate in isolation. Peers and adult experience children’s emotional competence skills working together during interaction and as supports for learning. Furthermore, emotional competence components also are related in a more variable-centered manner. This information could be very useful for programming. As well, more work with older children would be useful. It makes sense to now turn to means of promoting this “total package.”

Socialization of Emotional Competence

All components of emotional competence are, then, extremely important as foundations for young children’s social and academic success. How do children become emotionally competent at an age-appropriate level – or not? They do not develop these competencies in a vacuum. In the social worlds of preschoolers and gradeschoolers, both parents and teachers/caregivers loom large as socializers, and both are likely to provide children experiences that promote or deter the development of emotional competence (e.g., both experience strong emotions during caregiving; Garner, 2010). As children move into adolescence, friends are more and more important as socializers of emotional competence, these relationships become ever more central (Miller-Slough & Dunsmore, 2016).

Parent Socialization of Emotion

Much is known about the contribution of parental socialization of emotion to their children’s emotional competence (Denham, Bassett, & Wyatt, 2014; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998) – their modeling of emotional expressiveness, teaching about emotions, and reactions to children’s emotions. Parents’ generally positive emotional expression (with “safe” expression of negative emotions), encouraging reactions to children’s emotions, and openness to and expertise in talking about emotions, help their children become emotionally competent. Each aspect of socialization of emotion is considered here.

Further, beliefs about emotions are increasingly recognized as important to socialization of emotions (particularly acceptance of/attention to emotions and the value of emotions and their regulation; Meyer, Raikes, Virmani, Waters, & Thompson, 2014). Beliefs are related to actual enactment of socialization of emotion (e.g., parent-reported reactions to children’s emotions, Halberstadt, Thompson, Parker, & Dunsmore, 2008; Halberstadt et al., 2013; Wong, McElwain, & Halberstadt, 2009; and observed family negativity, Wong, Diener, & Isabella, 2008).

Another important consideration is the potential reciprocal nature of emotional transactions between parent and child; children’s emotionality undoubtedly affects parental socialization of emotion behaviors. For example, mothers’ positive emotion during a waiting task, administered four times between 18 and 48 months, increased more over time if their children were less angry, more content, or engaged more in positive emotion regulation strategies (Cole, LeDonne, & Tan, 2013; see also Fields-Olivieri, Cole, & Maggi, 2017). Mothers’ negative emotion decreased less when children were angrier than agemates (see also Premo and Kiel’s (2014) findings of 2-year-old boys’ support-seeking regulation strategies under low threat predicting mothers’ more supportive reactions to their emotions at age 3; mothers’ socialization behaviors could be seen as responses to their children’s earlier emotional lives).

Parent Socialization of Emotion for Preschoolers: Modeling

Regarding modeling, parents’ and children’s positive emotional expression are significantly related (Davis, Suveg, & Shaffer, 2015a; Fields et al., 2017). Conversely, when mothers are often angry and tense with them, young children are angrier and less emotionally positive (Denham, 1998; Newland & Crnic, 2011). Maternal positivity (supported by positive beliefs about children’s emotions) also contributes to Korean children’s emotion regulation (Cho & Lee, 2015). Well-modulated negative emotion, however, may have positive effects (Denham & Grout, 1992).

Parental emotion regulation (as modeled regulated or dysregulated emotion) also is an important contributor to aspects children’s emotional competence. Thus, parental dysregulation also contributes to children’s emotion regulation and behavior problems, often in concert with aspects of family emotional expressiveness. For example, Are and Shaffer (2016) found that preschoolers’ mothers who reported emotion dysregulation also reported less positive family expressiveness and more negative expressiveness. Maternal dysregulation directly predicted children’s emotion regulation or negativity/lability, and indirectly predicted children’s emotion regulation via lack of positive expressiveness (see also Ulrich & Petermann, 2017). In contrast, where maternal dysregulation was low, and children’s own positive emotion was high, preschoolers’ behavioral adjustment was facilitated (Davis, Suveg, & Shaffer, 2015b).

More specifically, parental use of certain emotion regulatory strategies can assist children in regulating emotions themselves. When mothers used attention refocusing, cognitive reframing, and comforting strategies during a disappointing gift task, their 4- to 7-year-old children did so as well. Further, mothers’ attention refocusing (especially with preschoolers) and joint attention refocusing and cognitive reframing were related to lessened sadness and anger after the strategy use (Morris, Silk, Morris, Steinberg, Aucoin, & Keyes, 2011).

Examining another detailed aspect of parental emotion regulation, awareness of emotion, Brajsa-Zganec (2014) found that Croatian mothers’ and fathers’ awareness of their own and their preschooler’s emotions were negatively related to the children’s negativity, which was directly related to internalizing and externalizing problems. Fathers’ awareness also was directly negatively related both types of behavior problems (mothers’ only to externalizing). Similarly, Crespo et al. (2017) found that mothers’ lack of awareness of their own emotions indirectly contributed to young children’s internalizing and externalizing problems, via the children’s difficulties with regulation. Maternal difficulties with emotion regulation also contributed to behavior externalizing and internalizing problems, mediated by children’s negativity. Thus, children witness parents’ abilities to regulate emotions, and consequently, parents’ regulation or dysregulation contributes to children’s own emotion regulation and behavior problems.

Parents’ emotions are also associated with children’s emotion knowledge (Watson & Nixon, 2001). Positive expressiveness in the family seems to promote emotion knowledge, perhaps because positive feelings render children more open to learning and problem-solving. Conversely, exposure to parents’ negative emotions can hamper young children’s emotion knowledge by upsetting them and making it difficult for them to self-reflect about issues of emotion (Denham, 1998; Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994; Raver & Spagnola, 2003). Exposure to well-regulated negative emotion, however, also can be positively related to this aspect of emotional competence (Garner, Jones, & Miner, 1994).

Parent Socialization of Emotion for Gradeschoolers and Adolescents: Modeling

No doubt parental emotions remain important as supports or detractors for their children’s emotional competence at these older ages. Although there is somewhat less research at this age level than for preschoolers (perhaps because of changes in researchers’ abilities to enter into family life), extant reports do paint a clear picture. For example, Duncombe, Havighurst, Holland, and Frankling (2012) found that 5- to 9-year-olds’ parents’ negative expressiveness related to their children’s emotion dysregulation (i.e., negativity and lability).

Parental expressiveness and regulation are also related to adolescents’ behavior problems. Parents’ negative expressivity linked with their 16-year-olds’ internalizing and externalizing (Stocker, Richmond, Rhoades, & Kiang, 2007; see also Yap, Schwartz, Byrne, Simmons, & Allen, 2010, who found mothers’ negative expressiveness related to young adolescents’ depressive symptoms via their emotion regulation). Adolescent anxiety may also be related to parents’ lack of awareness of their own and their children’s fear and anger (Hurrell et al., 2017).

Ability to move from negative to positive emotional expressiveness, adjusting emotions to situational demands – emotional flexibility – is also important. Living in an affectively negative, rigid environment can be harmful; compromised emotion regulation, sometimes with attendant symptomatology, can occur. For example, although families of children diagnosed with ADHD did not differ from those of nondiagnosed children in positive or negative expressiveness, they demonstrated less emotional flexibility (Van der Giessen & Bögels, 2018). In contrast, adolescent girls’ and mothers’ emotional flexibility – in an “emotional rollercoaster” task where they discussed five alternating negative and positive emotions in 15 min – was associated with fewer internalizing symptoms (Lougheed & Hollenstein, 2016).

As already noted, regulatory strategies can also be modeled. Regarding parents’ specific emotion regulation strategies, their reports of using reappraisal and suppression strategies predicted their reports of older children’s using the same strategies 1 year later (Gunzenhauser, Fäsche, Friedlmeier, & von Suchodoletz, 2014). Further, dysregulated gradeschoolers’ mothers endorsed using suppression and not using cognitive reappraisal to deal with their own emotions; more regulated children’s mothers did not use suppression (Castro, Halberstadt, & Garrett-Peters, 2017). Both overall parental dysregulation and specific strategy usage are related to children’s emotion regulation.

Experience sampling reports of youths’ cognitive reappraisal and emotion suppression strategy usage showed relations with mothers’ usage for younger adolescents and those reporting better mother-youth relationships (Silva, Freire, & Faria, 2018). Similarly, mothers who reported emotion suppression had adolescents who reported less awareness of their own emotions (Remmes & Ehrenreich-May, 2014). Adolescents are reflecting strategies that they observe in parents.

Fathers also may play a key role during this age range; reciprocal positive affect between fathers and their children predicted less emotion adolescent dysregulation reported by parents (and such emotion dysregulation predicted behavior problems reported by both parents and teachers, aggregated; Thomassin & Suveg, 2014). More socialization of emotion research specifically involving fathers is needed, echoing an oft-heard plea in developmental psychology.

Timing of emotions and behaviors also matters in socialization of emotion. Several researchers have begun to examine sequences of parent-child emotions, or parent-parent emotions. In one such study, gradeschoolers’ mothers’ and fathers’ sequentially congruent positive affect (e.g., mother smiles, and then father smiles) during triadic reminiscing about sad memories uniquely negatively predicted their children’s emotion dysregulation, which also mediated the association of maternal and child depressive symptoms (Thomassin, Suveg, Davis, Lavner, & Beach, 2017). More use of sequential and other temporal examination of emotions, of parents and/or their offspring, is called for (Lewis, Zinbarg, & Durbin, 2010).

Parent Socialization of Emotion for Preschoolers: Contingent Reactions to Children’s Emotions

In terms of reacting to children’s emotions, mother’s supportive reactions (e.g., encouraging emotions, focusing on the problem or emotion) to children’s emotions positively relate to preschoolers’ expressiveness of positive emotions (Fabes, Poulin, Eisenberg, & Madden-Derdich, 2002) and emotion regulation (Meyer et al., 2014; Spinrad, Stifter, Donelan-McCall, & Turner, 2004). In contrast, parents using unsupportive reactions to emotions (e.g., dismissing, punishing, showing distress) are more likely to have sadder, more fearful children (Berlin & Cassidy, 2003), often with compromised emotion regulation (Luebbe, Kiel, & Buss, 2011; Woods et al., 2017). Parents’ supportive reactions to children’s emotions also may help the child in differentiating emotions (Denham & Kochanoff, 2002; Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994; Fabes et al., 2002; Fabes, Leonard, Kupanoff, & Martin, 2001).

As seen with modeling socialization of emotion, children’s emotion regulation often mediates relations between parents’ reactions to emotions and children’s behavior problems. In Woods et al. (2017), for example, children’s dysregulated emotion mediated the relation between mothers’ nonsupportiveness and preschoolers’ aggression.

Parent Socialization of Emotion for Gradeschoolers and Adolescents: Contingent Reactions to Children’s Emotions

Parents’ reactions to their children’s emotions continue to be important to youth’s emotional competence, as well as social competence and school success outcomes. In many studies, the contributions to children’s emotional competence and social competence remain similar to patterns found in preschool. For example, Blair et al. (2014) found that maternally reported supportive and nonsupportive reactions to children’s emotions when children were 5 years old predicted (in expected directions) teachers’ and mothers’ reports of their emotion regulation at age 7, which then predicted children’s reports of their positive and negative friendship quality at age 10. Thus, a successful emotional transition from preschool to middle childhood was promoted by maternal supportive reactions during the preschool period.

Such relations continue through the gradeschool period. For example, Han, Qian, Gao, and Dong (2015) found that maternal and paternal supportiveness were related to Chinese children’s emotion regulation, and negatively related to their emotion dysregulation (see also Morelen, Shaffer, & Suveg, 2016, as well as Song & Trommsdorff, 2016, for similar findings with Korean families). In fact, in Han et al. (2015), parents’ lack of supportive reactions mediated the negative association of parental emotion dysregulation with child emotion regulation. Similarly, mothers’ nonsupportiveness mediated the relation between mothers’ dysregulation and children’s lability/negativity (Morelen et al., 2016; see also Ulrich & Petermann, 2017). Finally, parents’ supportive and unsupportive reactions can predict children’s specific strategy usage; parent’s supportiveness predicted their gradeschoolers’ use of reappraisal strategies, and nonsupportiveness their use of suppression strategies, 1 year later (Gunzenhauser et al., 2014).

Further, reciprocal and sequential relations remain important; Morelen and Suveg (2012) found that, during discussions about potentially difficult emotions, parents’ supportive responses to children’s observed adaptive emotion regulation led to their continued adaptive emotion regulation. The connection of parental reactions to children’s emotions and children’s emotion regulation is a crucial aspect of how emotional competence is socialized.

As with findings with parental expressiveness, supportive or unsupportive socialization of emotion also may be associated with children’s behavior problems. For example, Yi, Gentzler, Ramsey, and Root (2016) found that gradeschool children showed more externalizing and internalizing problems when mothers were dismissing to their positive emotions; in contrast, those with lower self-control were buffered from externalizing problems when mothers encouraged positive emotions. At the same time, as with preschoolers and with modeling of expressiveness, relations between parental supportiveness or nonsupportiveness and internalizing/externalizing behavior problems may be mediational via children’s emotion regulation (Jin, Zhang, & Han, 2017). Furthermore, such relations with behavior problems are also found for adolescents (e.g., Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007).

Some results are specific to particular emotions, and may be important for anxious children. Studying children from seven to 12 years old, some of whom had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, Hurrell et al. (2015) found that children’s reports of inhibiting sadness, expressing dysregulated anger, lack of awareness of emotions, and reluctance to express emotions were related to mothers’ less supportive reactions to their negative emotions. Fathers’ nonsupportiveness was related to their children’s difficulty regulating sadness.

Adolescent depression also is associated with parents’ reactions to emotions. Lougheed, Hollenstein, Lichtwarck-Aschoff, and Granic (2015) found that maternal supportiveness of both positive and negative emotions was less likely when their adolescents evidenced more depression; Shortt et al. (2016) found similar relations between parental supportiveness and nonsupportiveness and depressive symptoms, especially for boys and fathers (see also Desjardins & Leadbeater, 2011; Jobe-Shields, Buckholdt, Parra, & Tillery, 2014). In sum, aspects of socialization of emotion are related to children’s difficulties; even more longitudinal and observational sequential research would be very useful in zeroing in on directions of effects.

Validation and Invalidation

The use of one specific supportive reaction to children’s emotions – validation (i.e., accurately and nonjudgmentally referring to the emotion or emotional perspective of the child – “I can see you’re very angry”) versus unsupportive invalidation (e.g., “You’re not scared!”) can be very important. Lambie and Lindberg (2016) found that mothers’ validation during a game positively, and their invalidation negatively, contributed to children’s awareness of their own emotions (as part of emotion regulation).

In contrast, invalidation can lead to very negative results. Thus, in a study with gradeschoolers, Castro and colleagues (Castro et al., 2017) demonstrated that more labile (i.e., less regulated) children’s mothers endorsed showing contempt to their children’s emotions, as well as not valuing emotions. Buckholdt, Parra, and Jobe-Shields (2014) found that adolescents who felt that their parents invalidated their emotional expressions also were more likely to report internalizing and externalizing symptomatology, as mediated by their emotion dysregulation. Importantly, the adolescents’ reports of invalidation were related to parents’ own emotion dysregulation.

Also focusing on invalidation, Yap, Allen, and Ladouceur (2008) observed sequential patterns in of mother-adolescent interaction and obtained maternal reports of reactions to children’s emotions. Similar to Lambie and Lindberg’s (2016) findings with younger children, when mothers were observed to dampen their young adolescents’ positive affect (e.g., displayed dysphoric affect when the adolescent showed positive affect) or espoused invalidation techniques (e.g., reprimanding, discomfort, or controlling the adolescent’s positive emotions), their children displayed more emotionally dysregulated behavior during interaction and reported using more maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. Invalidation during the observed interactions and (for girls only) espousal of invalidation socialization also were related to depressive symptoms, mediated by adolescent use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. Thus, again, invalidation is particularly pernicious. Further, a focus on positive emotion is welcome, because of its potential protective function (Davis & Suveg, 2014).

Integrating Child Physiology

Examining supportiveness and nonsupportiveness as moderated by children’s physiological responses to emotion-eliciting situations, especially as it contributes to youth psychopathology, has been the focus of several recent studies. Because of the level of detail required to explain the studies, only two with gradeschoolers are discussed. However, other work is emerging with preschoolers (e.g., Hastings et al., 2008; Perry, Calkins, Nelson, Leerkes, & Marcovitch, 2012; Scrimgeour, Davis, & Buss, 2016) and adolescents (e.g., Hastings, Klimes-Dougan, Kendziora, Brand, & Zahn-Waxler, 2014). This area merits much continued work.

Skin conductance level (SCL; in a negative context, increases in SCL are often interpreted as indicating emotional reactivity) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; during a stressful event, RSA withdrawal marks mobilization of resources that support coping, whereas RSA augmentation reflects the maintenance of internal equilibrium and support for engagement) have been broadly used to reflect nervous system activity consonant with emotional experience.

For example, in a study with gradeschoolers with and without ADHD and their parents (Breaux, McQuade, Harvey, & Zakarian, 2018), children experienced two emotion-eliciting events, an impossible puzzle and social rejection task, and parents reported on the children’s emotion regulation, 1 year after their parents had reported on their contingent reactions and reports on child symptomatology had been obtained from parents and teachers. Overall effects suggested that supportiveness was related to all children’s later emotion regulation, as well as greater SCL reactivity for children with high ADHD symptoms. Nonsupportiveness was related to greater lability/negativity for children with high ADHD symptoms. It was considered that parents’ supportiveness and nonsupportiveness were protective and risk factors, respectively, especially for the development of emotion regulation in youth with ADHD. The increased SCL for ADHD youth with supportive parents was seen as a positive response, because low SCL reactivity in response to challenge suggests a deleterious insensitivity to environmental stressors. Emotion socialization factors were not predictive of RSA here; RSA may fluctuate depending on the stressor and age of the children tested, illustrating the subtlety inherent in these studies.

McQuade and Breaux (2017) utilized similar methodology with parent-reported measures and gradeschoolers’ experience of the emotion-eliciting task (social rejection) and physiological measurements. Physiological measures moderated the effects of parental report of contingent reactions on measures of adjustment. Supportiveness was more protective of children evidencing RSA augmentation in response to social rejection (perhaps a mark of lesser ability to mobilize resources in the face of the stressor), in terms of their emotion regulation, prosocial behavior, and peer rejection; these children may need and benefit from parental supportiveness. Children showing RSA withdrawal were relatively positive on outcome measures, independent of parents’ socialization of emotion. Parental nonsupportiveness was more detrimental for children with low SCL reactivity in terms of their anger/dysregulation, aggression, and peer rejection. Nonsupportiveness was most deleterious for children showing RSA withdrawal, in terms of their aggression. Thus, physiological reactivity during social stress, as evidence of vulnerability, may work jointly with socialization of emotion, especially for preadolescents at risk physiologically, who may be most in need of parental supportiveness. These illustrative studies show how our knowledge base expands when physiology is included.

At this point, several specific issues surrounding parental socialization of emotion need to be reviewed: (a) child report of parent socialization; (b) developmental changes in socialization of emotion; (c) between- and within-parent inconsistency in socialization of emotion; and (d) cultural considerations. These considerations are placed here because of the importance of contingent reactions to children’s emotions in each of the presentations.

Child Report of Parental Socialization of Emotion

Children can begin to report on their perceptions of socialization of emotion during gradeschool. Thus, Sanders, Zeman, Poon, and Miller (2015) found that children’s views of their parents’ nonsupportiveness were related to parents’ evaluation of the children’s anger dysregulation, less effective coping with anger and sadness, and depressive symptoms. Cross-informant reporting lends strength to these findings.

Extending this analysis to examine children’s self-reported social competence, Sharp, Cohen, Kitzmann, and Parra (2016) found that children’s perceptions of parents’ discouragement and non-response to their sadness were indirectly related to classroom peer-reported popularity and self-reported loneliness, via children’s self-perception of lower social competence. Active discouragement was also related to children’s increased classroom popularity via their sadness inhibition. Thus, children perceive how their parents are socializing their emotional competence, and such perceptions appear crucially related to important outcomes, via their feelings about themselves and their emotions.

Developmental Changes in Socialization of Emotion

The general pattern found in already reviewed studies resembles that for preschoolers (often beginning with emotion socialization during preschool), with age-appropriate outcomes. However, as children age, the outcomes of varying aspects of socialization of emotion may change. Examining families with 3- through 6-year-olds, Mirabile, Oertwig, and Halberstadt (2018) found that parents’ supportiveness (i.e., emotion- and problem-focused) was associated with adaptiveness of children’s emotion regulation strategies, as well as their behavior problems, but only for 3- and 4-year-olds. The contribution for older children was in the opposite direction, and nonsignificant.

The idea that socialization of emotion techniques, especially supportiveness to children’s emotional expressiveness, remain developmentally static, has not been challenged in this way until recently. Given a developmental perspective, however, socialization of emotion practices that have been considered adaptive for young children may become less developmentally appropriate, and even bear some relation to maladaptive outcomes; supportiveness does not fill the same function or convey the same message as children age. For example, Castro et al. (2017) found that, although maternal reports of their supportive reactions to third grade children’s emotions were associated with their own reports of the children’s social skills, the opposite held true for teacher reports of social skills, and in fact mothers’ supportive reactions were associated with teacher’s reports of behavior problems. Similarly, although Miller-Slough, Dunsmore, Zeman, Sanders, and Poon (2018) found that supportiveness to gradeschool children’s sadness reported by both parents was related positively to their reports of children’s social competence, it was also positively related to their internalizing problems (when both parents were not supportive, levels of social competence were average and internalizing symptoms low). In another study, more labile gradeschool children had more supportive mothers (Rogers, Halberstadt, Castro, MacCormack, & Garrett-Peters, 2016). Finally, considering nonsupportive, negatively affective participations in discussions about children’s sadness, having two similarly negatively responsive parents was related to lower externalizing in gradeschoolers (Poon, Zeman, Miller-Slough, Sanders, & Crespo, 2017).

Castro et al.’s (2017) findings first highlight contextual differences in the differing environments in which older children live, which vary considerably in the nature and intensity of demands made. Mothers could carefully support the emotions of children about whom teachers have concerns, but teachers may not see the improvements mothers do. Further, teachers and mothers may be attuned to differing aspects of social skills. Certainly, teachers’ benchmarks regarding even the same social skills, managing as they do many gradeschoolers at one time, may differ from mothers’.

Most importantly, however, and consonant with the findings of all four studies mentioned here, continued parental emotional supportiveness may no longer always be developmentally appropriate – gradeschoolers (and, of course, adolescents) need to determine autonomously their own ways to manage emotions. They need to develop their own strategies for expressing and regulating emotions. At the same time, it may be developmentally appropriate to redirect or even disapprove of children’s over-volatility or excessive dwelling on negative emotion.

Regarding parental emotion beliefs, new findings also show that their import changes with development. For example, beliefs that would seem to be consonant with negative child outcomes, such as believing that emotions are dangerous and that parents should not teach children about emotions, have been shown to relate to positive outcomes for older children, like being able to recognize parents’ emotions (Castro et al., 2016; see also Dunsmore, Her, Halberstadt, & Perez-Rivera, 2009). Given that in these studies the emotion knowledge assessment was of parents’ emotions, perhaps children whose parents consider emotions dangerous also become exquisitely sensitive to their parents’ micro-expressions. Further, in Garrett-Peters et al. (2017), expected relations of emotion knowledge with the belief that emotions are valuable did not obtain; perhaps in this case parents’ valuing of emotions has become less useful, having been more useful for promoting younger children’s emotion regulation, or, alternatively, this belief is still useful for aspects of emotion knowledge not measured in this study.

In short, future research should pinpoint developmentally appropriate responses to children’s and adolescents’ emotions. Changes in prediction by contingent reactions, as reported by Castro et al. (2017) and others, need to be further unpacked, understood, and compared to analogous results still finding “supportive” reactions to be useful for optimal development. Further, the importance of emotion beliefs is underscored here, and should be a continued focus.

Between- and Within-Parent Consistency as Socializers of Emotional Competence

Another important issue in the socialization of reactions to emotions is whether, and if so how, parents’ socialization of emotion works in concert. Perhaps having one parent who behaves supportively is “good enough” for positive child outcomes (Poon et al., 2017), or having parents who engage in a range of positive and negative emotion socialization practices, either within or across parents, could promote optimal outcomes in children’s emotional competence and behavior problems. These possibilities are uncovered at several developmental periods.

Differences between parents in socialization of emotion has been found to be beneficial in one study. McElwain, Halberstadt, and Volling (2007) found that having one supportive and one nonsupportive parent was positively related to young children’s emotion knowledge and lower peer conflict (boys only). Greater support by both parents was associated with less optimal functioning on these outcomes. Echoing arguments already suggested here, the authors speculated that high levels of supportiveness may shield children from emotionally challenging situations, hampering the ability to process emotional circumstances and learn about conflicts.

Regarding gradeschoolers, in Poon et al.’s study, having one parent who was engaged and showed positive responses during a discussion about their daughter’s sadness was associated with better psychosocial functioning (i.e., higher social competence and less externalizing and internalizing) than when neither parent showed such responses. In contrast, boys were rated by parents as most socially competent when one was highly positively responsive (i.e., supported and positively expressive during the discussion of sadness) and the other negative (i.e., unsupportive and expressively negative). Thus, again, a diverse range of parental responses to children’s emotions, rather than a uniformly supportive approach, may have the potential to facilitate children’s social-emotional development. Children no doubt make note of these inconsistencies and may become more attuned to emotions as a result.

Although more study is needed, it may be that such findings are restricted to Western cultures. That is, where mothers were less supportive, and fathers were more supportive, Chinese preschoolers were rated as having more internalizing symptoms (Yu, Volling, & Niu, 2015); further, where mothers were less controlling (i.e., less nonsupportive) and fathers were more controlling, children were rated as having more externalizing symptoms. These authors point out that fathers do the disciplining in China, such that their reactions are most salient, especially when mothers’ socialization of emotion seems subdued. In any case, mixed socialization of emotion messages does not appear salutary for young Chinese children as noted for US parents.

Turning from between-parent differences and similarities, examining consistency within parents can be important. For example, in Miller-Slough et al. (2018), families where fathers showed high supportiveness and nonsupportiveness had lower social competence but also fewer internalizing problems. Although that pattern is somewhat difficult to explain, perhaps being active in socialization of emotion is important – sometimes supportiveness is called for, but sometimes “nonsupportiveness” (e.g., punitiveness, dismissiveness) is also called for, especially for older children for whom standards of emotional conduct may be becoming more stringent.

In contrast, Mirabile (2014) found that a slightly different type of within-person inconsistency (i.e., negative expressiveness paired with punitive reactions to preschoolers’ negative emotions – two perhaps contradictory manifestations of socialization) was related to internalizing and maladaptive regulation, but also to adaptive emotion regulation. In this case, depending on the child, perceiving a parent who shows negative expressiveness and also punishes the child for negativity could overarouse or motivate efforts to comply with the parent’s push for the child to control their emotions. Again, “mixed messages” may capture certain children’s attention and, for some, promote emotional competence. Much more work is needed to clarify these potential mechanisms and the boundary conditions under which differences between and within parents’ socialization of emotion are beneficial or detrimental.

Cultural Considerations in Socialization of Emotion

All beliefs and practices associated with emotions are created and interpreted within cultural and historical, socially embedded, contexts, such as the situational ecologies in which emotions and interactions actually occur, and the criteria for interpreting social-emotional events (De Leersnyder, Boiger, & Mesquita, 2015). Thus, socialization of emotion is situated within every culture’s narrative regarding the child outcomes that are most valued, and the best ways to reach these outcomes. This section is a short summary of, and examples of, ways in which culture matters to socialization of emotion.

Friedlmeier, Çorapçı, and Cole (2011) have put forward clear descriptions of how and why preferred modes of socialization of emotion will differ across cultures valuing individualistic or relational emotional competence (whether based on nationality or ethnicity). In this chapter the research described generally emanates from Western, individualistic, cultural values. These values permeate the very conceptions and expected outcomes of supportive and unsupportive reactions to children’s emotions already described here, as well as the components of coaching and even of modeling of emotional expressiveness (i.e., discussing and coaching emotions, being aware of children’s emotions, being mostly emotionally positive, using care when expressing negative emotions). In contrast, within relational cultures, socialization of emotion is often informed by the need to consider the interpersonal group and its needs, rather than the individual child’s. Such values may emphasize not encouraging emotional expressiveness – in fact, punishing it; negative expressiveness may be used more liberally to inform children of their need to refrain from their own expressiveness. Emotions may not be discussed because they need to be suppressed. Finally, child outcomes of such socialization of emotion messages may be positive where Western thinking would predict them to be negative. For any cultural narrative, it is imperative to understand what matters.

However, parents in more relational cultures, like their individualistic counterparts, do sometimes also endorse reactions that are attuned to the child’s individual needs. Although American, Turkish, and Romanian mothers reported many differences in their preferred modes of reacting to their toddlers’ differing emotions (e.g., US mothers endorsed discipline to cope with anger, whereas those from the more relational nations emphasized reasoning), all endorsed comforting their toddlers’ fear and helping them solve problems related to anger (Çorapçı et al., 2018). Some goals may be more universal.

Thus, despite some similar emotion-related behaviors, and even though in quite a few cases outcomes of contingent reactions to children’s emotions are similar in both individualistic and relational cultures (e.g., in Yu et al., 2015, where fathers’ controlling responses to children’s emotions were related to children’s behavior problems), there are many cultural differences in both endorsement of socialization of emotion strategies and concomitant outcomes. For example, Indian immigrant mothers were more likely than US mothers to endorse minimizing children’s emotions (probably because of their disruption to collective harmony), but this practice was not related to child outcomes as it was for US mothers (McCord & Raval, 2016).

In other studies, child outcomes were opposite to those expected from the Western view of socialization of emotion (e.g., Louie et al., 2015). As an example, Jin et al. (2017) found that only when mothers were more controlling regarding their preschoolers’ positive emotions, the children’s emotion knowledge was associated with lower behavior problem and higher social competence scores. These investigators suggest that the Confucian heritage prioritizes relational socialization of emotion, whereby children who embody modesty, and in this case also are more knowledgeable about emotions, are viewed as more competent.

Further, even within the USA the injunction “know what matters” holds true. Parents in cultural groups based on ethnicity hold different values, compared to European American parent, which impact the nature and outcome of socialization of emotion. For example, Nelson et al. (2013) found that European American mothers using problem-focused reactions to their children’s negative emotions, helping them to solve the problem, had children whose kindergarten teachers evaluated as more academically and socially competent. This finding would be expected from the “standard” Western view. In contrast, African American mothers’ lack of encouragement of emotions (e.g., not endorsing “it’s OK to cry when you feel unhappy”) predicted these types of competence; controlling emotions may adaptive in a discriminatory society. Further, Pintar Breen, Tamis-LeMonda, and Kahana-Kalman (2018) found that Latina immigrant mothers’ supportiveness was associated with their preschoolers’ emotion knowledge, but that their nonsupportiveness was also (marginally) positively related. The cultural value “respeto” emphasizes children’s obedience and proper demeanor, within an affectionate atmosphere. Given these findings, investigators suggested that what is generally termed nonsupportiveness may have a different meaning in this group; that is, reflecting “respeto,” Latina mothers exhibit a mixture of warmth and control when responding to their children’s emotions, and children, seeing this as normative, glean information about the nature of their emotions (see also Fiorilli, Stasio, Chicchio, & Chan, 2015, who found Chinese mothers to demonstrate high scores on both coaching and dismissing approaches to children’s emotions – somewhat similar values of emotional restraint within care and affection also may be operative).

Thus, attention must be paid to make our conceptualiz]ation and measurement of socialization of emotion culturally sensitive, informed by the entire corpus of belief that undergirds a culture’s view of emotion. That is, conceptualizing what is optimal socialization of emotion is to an extent culturally relative, such that care needs to be taken to know from a culture’s perspective, what are the goals for socialization of emotion, and measurement needs to refer to emotional situations and parental reactions that make sense in a given culture.

Parent Socialization of Emotion for Preschoolers: Teaching

In its simplest form, teaching about emotion consists of verbally explaining an emotion and its relation to an observed event or expression. It is not surprising that adults’ tendencies to discuss emotions, and the quality of their communications about emotions, if nested within a warm relationship, assist the child in expressing emotions (Denham, Cook, & Zoller, 1992). Such scaffolded teaching about emotions may help to direct children’s attention to salient emotional cues, helping them understand emotional interactions and manage their own responses. At the same time, emotion conversations with parents allow children to separate impulses from behavior, giving them reflective distance from feelings, and space in which to interpret and evaluate feelings’ causes and consequences, fostering both emotion knowledge and regulation (Brown & Dunn, 1992; Denham & Grout, 1992; Denham, Renwick-DeBardi, & Hewes, 1994; Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991; Garner, Dunsmore, & Southam-Gerrow, 2008). The general trend of these findings also holds true for low-income, minority families (Garner, 2006; Garner, Jones, Gaddy, & Rennie, 1997).

The benefits of such teaching and coaching can begin quite early, and the co-action of parent and child may be crucial. When parents elicited toddlers’ labels and causes for emotions in a storybook task, children helped and shared more quickly and more often in experimental tasks (Brownell, Svetlova, Anderson, Nichols, & Drummond, 2013; see also Drummond, Paul, Whitney, Hammond, & Brownell, 2014). It is important to note that in this study parents’ own labeling and explaining were not associated with toddlers’ prosocial behaviors. Further, questions can be important elements in emotion teaching and its promotion of preschoolers’ emotion knowledge (especially girls; Bailey, Denham, & Curby, 2013) – they push children to think and formulate thoughts about the conversation’s emotional content, to practice using challenging language, and to put emotional memories and experiences into words (Salmon & Reese, 2016). Thus, parents who can ensure children’s engagement in the emotional conversation, and co-construct emotional meaning, may stand the best chance of promoting young children’s emotion knowledge (Brownell et al., 2013; Laible, Panfile Murphy, & Augustine, 2013).

Parent Socialization of Emotion for Gradeschoolers and Adolescents: Teaching

Parents’ emotion teaching and coaching continue to be important to youth’s emotional competence, as well as social competence, remission from or lack of behavior problems, and school success. For example, Dunsmore, Booker, Ollendick, and Greene (2016; see also Dunsmore, Booker, & Ollendick, 2013) found that, where parents engaged in emotion coaching before a treatment program for children with oppositional defiant disorder (e.g., discussing causes and consequences of emotions during discussions of emotion memories), children high in mother-reported negativity/lability were especially less likely to show disruptive behavior problems post treatment. The coaching predicted greater change for those most at risk. Similarly, Duncombe et al. (2012) found that coaching beliefs (e.g., considering the child’s negative emotions as teachable moments) were related to early gradeschoolers’ emotion regulation, and hence to fewer behavior problems. Regarding adolescents, mothers’ emotion coaching of anger was related to better anger regulation in adolescent siblings, which was in turn related to less externalizing behavior (Shortt, Stoolmiller, Smith-Shine, Mark Eddy, & Sheeber, 2010).

It is important to explore the potential mechanisms accounting for such findings. Thus, other researchers have examined how teaching about emotions specifically transpires in mother-child dyadic conversations. During reminiscences about emotions, mothers of anxious children, compared to those of nonanxious children, spoke less frequently, were less elaborative in what they did say, used fewer positive emotions words, and/or discouraged their children’s discussion (Brumariu & Kerns, 2015; Suveg et al., 2008; Suveg, Zeman, Flannery-Schroeder, & Cassano, 2005). In Suveg et al., fathers also explained less about emotions and were less emotionally positive with sons. The children who were more anxious (or diagnosed with anxiety disorder) showed less positive affect and engaged in fewer problem-solving emotion regulation strategies when discussing anxious or angry situations; they were also found to be more affectively intense, with more misfit between their emotion and the discussion (Brumariu & Kerns, 2015). Direction of effect is always difficult to project when constructs are measured simultaneously, but at the very least, in families where children are anxious, parent-child communication about affect is nonoptimal, and parents do not appear to support emotional competence. These findings bear extension due to their family and clinical implications.

Summary: Parent Socialization of Emotion

In sum, parental (mostly maternal) socialization of emotion – modeling, contingent reactions, and teaching – contributes much to all components of emotional competence, as well as to social competence and behavior problems. Further, new information exists on the import of children’s report of parent socialization, developmental changes in socialization of emotion, between- and within-parent inconsistency in socialization of emotion, and cultural considerations.

But what about the influence of friends, and of teachers in the classroom? Their contribution could be extremely important, in the same or new and different ways.

Friend Socialization

Although much research is emerging since Denham, Bassett, and Wyatt’s (2014) call for more investigation of how friends might socialize each other’s emotional competence, the preponderance of research still considers the socializing behaviors and beliefs of parents. However, especially as children reach an age where peers assume pivotal importance in their lives, friends should be considered as potential socializers of emotional competence as well (Miller-Slough & Dunsmore, 2016; von Salisch & Zeman, 2018).

With friends, emotional expressiveness and experience, emotion regulation, and emotion knowledge of two individuals in a similar developmental context may become related as intimate interactions transpire over time. Relationships between friends are horizontal ones, unlike the vertical parent-child relationship. Neither member has more expertise or power, making friendship ripe for co-socialization of emotion. In fact, the experience of having friends, with whom one shares feelings, can afford an avenue toward emotional competence, and vice versa.

Thus, in a longitudinal study examining friendship dyads, young adolescents with more reciprocal friends reported using fewer aggressive anger regulation strategies (e.g., verbal and relational aggression, revenge fantasies), and more frequently using reappraisal of anger-eliciting events, across two different lagged time periods (von Salisch & Zeman, 2018). Earlier, these researchers uncovered the opposite direction of effect – constructive anger regulation via redirection of attention, use of social support when angry, and willingness to self-disclose emotions (for girls only) predicted more reciprocal friendships at a later measurement. Thus, having friends promoted, and was promoted by, emotional competence involving more optimal emotion regulation strategies (von Salisch, Zeman, Luepschen, & Kanevski, 2014).

In fact, relations between friendship and emotional competence may be more complex than even these depictions. That is, von Salisch (2018) has uncovered upward and downward spiral effects, with adolescents more willing to self-disclose emotions at the beginning of the study having more friends at the second time of measurement, leading to more self-disclosure at the third measurement – an upward spiral. In contrast, adolescents with less adaptive coping with sadness and tendencies toward social isolation were likely to have fewer friends at the second assessment, with intensified reclusive tendencies at the third measurement – a downward spiral.

Along with associations between having friends and components of emotional competence, adolescent friends begin to fulfill the function of emotional supportiveness, just when parents’ supportiveness may become more variably facilitative. Good friends, especially girls, are more likely to be supportive than unsupportive in response to friend’s emotions, and feel free to express emotion with each other (Glick & Rose, 2011; Klimes-Dougan et al., 2014).

Other reports of friends’ socialization of emotion show impacts of such supportiveness and nonsupportiveness. For example, aspects of friends’ supportiveness were associated with lower externalizing, whereas aspects of friends’ nonsupportiveness were associated with greater internalizing and externalizing (Klimes-Dougan et al., 2014). Further, friends’ supportiveness has been linked to fewer symptoms of depression (e.g., Desjardins & Leadbeater, 2011). Friends’ supportiveness may become more developmentally salient than parents’, and related to positive outcomes, as the focus of social-emotional development shifts to the broader social world. 

Along with supportive and unsupportive reactions to friends’ emotions, friends may also model expressiveness, not always with salutary outcomes; friends may become more similar in terms of depressed affect (Giletta et al., 2011; Kiuru, Burk, Laursen, Nurmi, & Salmela-Aro, 2012). At times, depressive symptomatology also can impede friend supportiveness; Lougheed et al. (2016) found friend supportiveness to positive emotion was lower for depressed adolescents.

Regarding coaching one another about emotions Legerski, Biggs, Greenhoot, and Sampilo (2015) worked from the premise that friends’ use of emotion terms during conversations may provide a means to convey emotional meaningfulness of events and circumstances, a shared sense of emotional support and arena for growth in emotion knowledge. These investigators noted dyadic similarity in the use of positive and negative emotion terms during discussions of personal problems. When friends responded to their partner’s emotion talk supportively and not dismissively, self-disclosure in subsequent utterances increased. Sharing of emotions, discussing how to deal with them, can be a very important component of adolescent friendship.

Discussion of emotion can become complex during this age range. Rumination is the repeated and prolonged discussion or thoughts about negative circumstances. Its import is somewhat unclear, and whether it has positive or negative ramifications may differ depending on when it occurs in development (Cole, 2014). It has been related to mothers’ affection and supportiveness (Stone et al., 2017); perhaps feeling secure that feelings are fertile ground for discussion can lead the sensitive adolescent to continue a vicious cycle of thought and feeling (e.g., “why didn’t he call me????”). Friends’ pronounced co-rumination during adolescence has been related to increased depression and anxiety and ultimately, lessened friendship quality, but also to enhanced friendship quality (Rose, Schwartz-Mette, Glick, Smith, & Luebbe, 2014). Some associations are gender-dependent; overall, co-rumination appears more positive for boys than girls. However, greater clarity is needed on how co-ruminating adolescents may socialize each other’s emotional competencies, as well their externalizing and internalizing problems. In sum, findings on friend’s socialization of emotional competence are emerging, with upcoming findings eagerly anticipated.

Teacher Socialization of Emotion

After considering parental and friend socialization of emotion, it follows that teachers’ socialization of emotional competence will also promote social-emotional and even academic success in school. The literature is rather sparse on this aspect of socialization, and what little exists almost unanimously refers to preschool education. Thus, what is known will be reviewed here, along with ideas of how to assist teachers in becoming better socializers of emotion (ideas that could potentially be useful to parents, as well).

During the preschool period, contexts outside the family become important for children’s development. Preschool is rich in emotional experiences, and young children learn about emotions through daily interactions with teachers and peers. In addition, even when children are not directly involved in an interaction, they learn about social and emotional by observing social-emotional behaviors of peers and teachers. Thus, recent research has identified preschool teachers as pivotal facilitators of the development of children’s social-emotional competence (Denham, Bassett, & Zinsser, 2012); for example, high levels of teacher emotional support and positive emotional tone in the classroom are related to better social-emotional outcomes for children (Curby, Brock, & Hamre, 2013; Spivak & Farran, 2016).

Most research, however, focuses on teachers’ overall abilities to provide an emotionally supportive environment in the classroom, not their discrete emotion socialization behaviors. This lack should be rectified, because early childhood education research indicates that preschool teachers are likely to engage in a wide variety of specific emotion socialization behaviors in the classroom, parallel to parental emotion socialization behaviors (Ahn & Stifter, 2006; Ersay, 2007). For example, teachers show emotions and react to children’s emotions in ways like parents (Denham, Bassett, & Zinsser, 2012). They also use emotion language in the classroom, although relatively infrequently (Yelinek & Grady, 2017); they explain and question during teacher-led activities and use socializing and guiding language during free play (e.g., “we smile when we say hello,” “you can pound these blocks if you’re mad”), especially when it is aggressive.

In short, given the relative abundance of literature on parents’ roles in socialization of emotion, as well as similar roles that parents and teachers have as socializers and the increasing time children are spending in group settings, it can be assumed that there is a fundamental relation between early childhood teachers’ socialization and young children’s emotional competence. Different emotions and reactions to children’s emotions during interactions are likely to send different socialization messages about specific emotions and emotion-related behaviors to children in the classroom, just as they do in the home.

Some early childhood teachers are already intuitively aware of the importance of their own emotions, as well as children’s, to learning and well-being and closely attend to these issues in the classroom (Zembylas, 2007; Zinsser, Denham, Curby, & Shewark, 2015; Zinsser, Shewark, Denham, & Curby, 2014). But preservice teachers report little training on developing emotional competence in students or managing their own internal feelings and external displays of emotion (Garner, 2010; Poulou, 2005; Schonert-Reichl, Kitil, & Hanson-Peterson, 2017), and relatively few schools of education are prepared to train teachers on these matters (Schonert-Reichl et al., 2017). Moreover, there are individual differences in teachers’ enactment of best practice in this area (Zinsser et al., 2014, 2015). Encouraging research is, however, emerging suggesting that emotional competence concepts can be successfully infused in an undergraduate course on curriculum and instruction (Waajid, Garner, & Owen, 2013). Even greater understanding of teacher socialization of emotion in early childhood education could lead toward needed developments in teacher preservice/in-service training.

But what is actually known about teacher socialization of emotion? Given the parent literature on how emotional competence is socialized, informed predictions can be made about the contributions of early childhood teacher socialization. Their modeling, reacting, and teaching are likely to contribute to young children’s emotional competence, and directly and indirectly (via children’s emotional competence) to children’s early school success. Recalling findings on parents’ emotion regulation, teachers’ own emotional competence is likely to be key.

Teachers’ Own Emotional Competence

The ways in which teachers deal with their own emotional lives – perceiving emotions of self and others, using emotions to facilitate cognition and action, understanding emotions, and managing them – undoubtedly contribute to their socialization of pupils’ emotional competence (Brackett & Katulak, 2006). For example, preschool teachers’ emotional competence is related to their reactions to children’s emotions; in Ersay’s work (2015), preschool teachers with low awareness of their own emotions were less likely to self-report that they would help children label and regulate their emotions, or to try to help solve the problem. In Ersay’s earlier (2007) work, teachers low on emotional awareness more often ignored children’s emotions, and less often comforted children’s negative emotions or matched their positive emotions. Further, teachers’ reports of their own negative emotional intensity were associated with their punishing of children’s emotions, and lack of attention to their own emotions was related to their greater minimization of children’s emotions.

Given such circumstances, and because teaching can be emotionally draining and unpredictable (Jeon, Hur, & Buettner, 2016), it would beneficial to help teachers to become more emotionally competent themselves. Jennings and Greenberg (2009) suggested ways to promote teacher emotional competence, including mindfulness training, reflective supervision, stress reduction and direct training. In fact, Kemeny et al. (2012) have shown that mindfulness training does promote teachers’ own emotional competence, with lasting effect.

Teacher Socialization of Emotion: Modeling

It is expected that teachers’ positive expressiveness would be positively related to children’s emotional competence in the classroom: their positive expressiveness, emotion regulation, and understanding of emotions. Specifically, teachers’ positive emotionality would help children express and experience calmer, more regulated positivity themselves, and render them receptive to learning about emotions and broader topics. In contrast, intense teacher negativity would create an atmosphere where regulation is difficult. Mild teacher negativity might help children learn about emotions, but inexpressive teachers would not provide a welcoming platform for such learning.

Despite these predictions, very little research has yet targeted expressive modeling by teachers. Recent work suggested that teachers’ negative expressiveness was negatively related to older preschoolers’ positivity during peer interaction (Morris, Denham, Bassett, & Curby, 2013). Ongoing results go further to suggest that when teachers in the USA and Italy show predominantly positive emotions, so do the children in their classrooms (Denham et al., 2016).

To promote children’s emotional competence, teacher training could focus on helping teachers to be willing to show emotions, remain emotionally positive in the classroom despite challenges, and modulate understandable negative emotions (Zinsser et al., 2014, 2015). Promotion of the teachers’ own emotional competence also could be useful for their modeling, increasing their abilities to accurately express emotions, generate positivity, reflect on, and manage emotions. Mindfulness techniques could help teachers maintain positivity, and reflective supervision could help teachers gain access to and understand their own emotions.

Teacher Socialization of Emotion: Reactions

It is expected that teachers’ supportive reactions to children’s emotions would be positively related to children’s positive expressiveness, ability to regulate emotions, and their emotion knowledge, with the converse true for their punishing or minimizing reactions. Encouraging responses from teachers would assist children in tolerating and regulating emotions, teaching them that emotions are moments for sharing, manageable, and even useful. Finally, supportive reactions would help children “stay in the moment” to learn more about emotions. Adaptive responses to children’s emotions would also support their social competence and academic success.

Even very young children do notice teachers’ reactions to their emotions. Dunn (1994) found that young children absorb not only content, but also form and quality, of teachers’ emotional support during child care transitions. Ahn and Stifter (2006) described such contingent responding to children’s emotions; teachers encouraged positive emotional expression and responded empathically to it. In response to children’s negative emotional expressions, they demonstrated empathy, physical comfort, distraction, problem-solving, ignoring, and negative responses such as restriction, threatening, ridicule, or minimization.

Further, teacher responses to child emotions differ by child age. More socialization reactions are targeted at younger than older preschoolers (Kiliç, 2015). In Ahn’s work (Ahn, 2005; Ahn & Stifter, 2006), toddlers’ teachers were more encouraging, and used physical comfort and distraction in response to children’s negative emotions more often than preschool teachers, who relied more on verbal mediation. Ahn’s work also demonstrates that early childhood teachers do not validate children’s negative emotion very often – one of the major tenets of emotion coaching. However, when they do validate that emotions are okay to feel and express, observers report greater prevalence of positive emotion and prosocial behaviors in the children (Karalus, Herndon, Bassett, & Denham, 2016). In contrast, early childhood teachers in this research were also very focused on having their students develop independent emotion regulation (Ahn, 2005; Ahn & Stifter, 2006; see also Karalus et al., 2016).

Building on these descriptions, Bassett et al. (2017) found that teachers’ supportive, nonsupportive, and validating reactions to preschoolers’ emotions contributed to children’s negativity and emotion regulation, in expected directions, but particularly for those with low surgent temperaments. Morris et al. (2013) also showed that teachers’ dismissing reactions were negatively related to older preschoolers’ positive expressivity and emotion knowledge. Finally, accepting beliefs about children’s emotions and perspective-taking ability promote teachers’ supportive reactions to children’s emotions (Swartz & McElwain, 2012).

To promote this aspect of socialization of emotion, teacher training could focus on ways of assisting teachers in valuing their supportive role concerning children’s emotions and give them specific strategies to use in reacting to children’s more difficult emotions (e.g., anger, fear, sadness, even over-excitement). Promoting teachers’ own emotional competence would likely assist them in utilizing emotional encounters more advantageously. Stress reduction could help teachers in their expression of supportive reactions to children’s emotions.

Teacher Socialization of Emotion: Teaching About Emotions

It is expected that teachers who discuss emotions give children tools to use in expressing/regulating emotions. Via such direct, not misleading or idiosyncratic, tutelage, teachers could help children learn about emotions. Finally, children with teachers more willing and adept at teaching about emotions would be seen as more socially competent and ready to learn.

Ahn (2005) conducted qualitative observations of which teachers’ emotion-related discourse with children. Their emotion-related discussions in preschool classrooms, as opposed to toddlers’, more frequently helped children infer causes of their negative emotions and taught them constructive ways of expressing negative emotion. Preschool teachers who value teaching children about emotions also promote children’s more adaptive emotion regulation patterns (Denham, Grant, & Hamada, 2002). Moreover, Kolmodin (2007) found individual differences in in teachers’ (not unlike parents’) propensity to talk about emotions with preschoolers.

These values and propensities for emotion talk can translate into classroom and parenting practice. Several picturebook-reading styles of preschool teachers have been identified, which relate positively to children’s emotion knowledge (Bassett, Denham, Mohtasham, & Austin, 2016). For example, children whose teacher used more questions for explaining causes and consequences of characters’ emotions (e.g., “Do you think she is sad because the ball fell in the river?”) showed greater growth in emotion knowledge than those whose teachers did not.

Promoting teachers’ own emotional competence also could improve their ability to perceive emotions accurately, so that they could usefully talk about them with children. Use of reflective supervision could also aid teachers in giving them access to emotion vocabulary and increasing their ease in discussing feelings. Further teacher training could focus on ways of helping teachers to value teacher-child emotion conversations and sustain interchanges about emotions in classroom activities and dialogues about ongoing classroom interactions.

Summary and Looking Forward: Teacher Socialization of Emotion

These initial research efforts require extension. More details are required. Examining micro-levels of teachers’ emotion socialization behaviors in the classroom could further understanding of socialization of emotion in classrooms. Knowing the relations of their discrete emotion socialization behaviors with children’s developing emotional competence could be very useful for teacher training.

Further, recent research suggests that continued study should also attend to aspects of teachers’ lives that could promote their abilities as socializers of emotional competence: well-being (e.g., the balance of their job resources and demands, wages, and perception of being able to pay for their basic expenses; Cassidy, King, Wang, Lower, & Kintner-Duffy, 2017; Denham, Bassett, & Miller, 2017; King et al., 2016); their own emotional competence (e.g., Swartz & McElwain, 2012), and experience (Denham et al., 2017). At the same time, training needs need to be improved, including adequate preservice on the topic (Buettner, Hur, Jeon, & Andrews, 2016; Garner, 2010; Schonert-Reichl et al., 2017), in-service training, and professional development regarding evidence-based practices (Steed & Roach, 2017).

Educating for Emotional Competence

Knowing the importance of children’s emotional competence and the contributions of adults’ socialization, mention of how successfully this is dealt with in schools (both programming and assessment), as well as support for parents, should be briefly discussed. First, an integrated system of educational practice is recommended; Denham (2015) has described such a system. As noted when this chapter began, age-appropriate developmental tasks are the substrate upon which specific emotional competence skills are demonstrated and developed; (b) standards are created emanating from these important competencies as road maps of what skills to look for, expect, and teach; (c) standards inform choice of assessment tools, and vice versa; (d) both standards and assessment are useful in that they lead to instruction (which often leads to the need for further, regular assessment and revised standards, and can be supported by both professional development for teachers as emotion socializers, as well as curriculum or less structured programming; see Humphrey, 2013); and (e) finally, educators strive to promote growth in children’s emotional competence. In this chapter, instructional programming and assessment are briefly considered.

Effective Emotional Competence Programming

Several meta-analyses have noted the efficacy of programming for social-emotional learning (which includes the components of emotional competence; e.g., Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Sklad, Diekstra, Ritter, Ben, & Gravesteijn, 2012; Taylor, Oberle, Durlak, & Weissberg, 2017). Durlak et al. showed that the reviewed programs showed improvement compared to control groups in social-emotional skills, behavior problems, and academic performance (see also Sklad et al., 2012). The benefits of programming held true from kindergarten through high school, and in urban, suburban, and rural schools. Benefits were as great in teacher-led as in researcher-led programming, but documentation of appropriate, accurate implementation of any program is key. Taylor et al. (2017) gave evidence that the programs’ benefit for social-emotional skills, behavior problems, and academic performance was significant at follow-up periods from 6 months to 18 years, and that benefits did not vary by students’ race, SES, or geographical location. Moreover, there were significant positive effect sizes for outcomes such as school attendance, dropout, safe sexual behavior, and juvenile justice involvement. Thus, social-emotional programming works (although this statement is not without some controversy; Humphrey, 2013). The crucial skills covered in this chapter can be promoted.

There are several criteria for quality programming in emotional competence. Durlak et al. (2011) summarize these by the acronym SAFE: (a) sequenced, lessons are connected and coordinated, consistent in providing clear objectives and activities, clear in their contribution to the overall program goals; (b) active, active learning approaches rather than lecture or other passive modes of learning are used; (c) focused, any useful program involves at least one of the components considered important here; and (d) explicit, lessons are explicit in terms of the component skill that is their goal. For the most positive, long-lasting results, infusing emotional competence throughout all teaching and creating opportunities for skill application throughout the day would be crucial, as well as having all the adults and all the environments, both proximal and distal, in a child’s life involved in emotional competence programming. These goals require school-wide coordination, and ultimately school-family and school-community partnerships (Payton et al., 2000; see Denham & Bassett, 2018, for more details).

Exemplary programs are mentioned by both Denham and Bassett (2018) and Camras and Halberstadt (2017). But two other types of programming bear mentioning here. First, there are several efficacious programs for parents as socializers of emotion. In Havighurst, Wilson, Harley, Prior, and Kehoe (2010), parents participating in the intervention reported significant improvements in their own emotion awareness and regulation, increases in emotion coaching, decreases in emotionally dismissive beliefs and behaviors, and increases in emotion talk; all these aspects of socialization of emotion have been shown to be very important here. Consequently, child emotional knowledge improved, and reductions in child behavior problems were reported. Subsequent programming has been extended to parents of adolescents (Kehoe, Havighurst, & Harley, 2014), parents of toddlers (Lauw, Havighurst, Wilson, Harley, & Northam, 2014), and fathers (Wilson, Havighurst, & Harley, 2014).

Second, several researchers have noted that even toddlers, as well as preschoolers and early gradeschoolers, can benefit from very simple programming aimed at teaching them about emotion terms (Grazzani, Ornaghi, Agliati, & Brazzelli, 2016; Ornaghi, Brockmeier, & Grazzani, 2014; Ornaghi, Grazzani, Cherubin, Conte, & Piralli, 2015; see also Fernández-Sánchez et al., 2015). After reading with their teacher books including an enriched emotional lexicon, and then conversing about them, children showed growth in emotion knowledge, and in some studies prosocial orientation. The simplicity of this programming, and the young age of some children benefitting from it, are of interest.

Given good programming, teachers will want to know where students stand on emotional competencies. This need leads to a discussion on assessment.

Assessment of Emotional Competence

“What’s measured gets treasured” – if emotional competence is assessed well, better decisions about how to facilitate children’s functioning can be made (Denham, 2006). Emotional competence assessment can highlight specific needs of children and classrooms in terms of programming, and show overall effects of programming (Denham, Ji, & Hamre, 2010; Denham et al., 2009). But any measure must meet certain standards (for details see Denham & Bassett, 2018; Denham et al., 2009; Kendziora, Weissberg, Ji, & Dusenbury, 2011). Finally, there needs to be a good reason why children are assessed, and there needs to be a system in place to use the resultant information. Useful emotional competence assessment tools can be found in Denham (2015), Denham, Ji, & Hamre (2010), and Humphrey et al. (2011). However, much work needs to be done to make assessments useful to educators and parents. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) Assessment Work Group is working toward that goal. Finally, McKown (2017) offers an articulate analysis for the next generation of emotional competence assessment.

Summary and Conclusions

The importance of emotional competence was introduced, and evidence given of how it facilitates both their social competence and school success, often longitudinally. Attention was given to socializers of such emotional competence: parents, friends, and teachers. Finally, within an educational system of practice put forward, programming and assessment can work synergistically to promote these competencies.

What is needed now, given the relative explosion of research into children’s and adolescents’ emotional competence, within the last 15 years? There are theoretical issues to consider. Conceptualization of emotion regulation and emotional experience still raises questions. The role of culture in demonstration and socialization of emotional competence should be given even more attention, because this is a global society.

There also are empirical and applied issues to consider. Much more consideration of teachers’ own emotional competence and their means of socializing young children’s emotional competence is sorely needed at this point, along with integrating this knowledge with current approaches to professional development programming, and assessment. Ways to help parents promote their children’s emotional competence, and more on the role of their own emotional competence, capitalizing on newer findings on their emotion regulation, are also required. These are challenges for the field that cannot be overlooked.

There also are several methodological issues that bear attention, to answer questions about emotional competence even more convincingly (Hollenstein, Tighe, & Lougheed, 2017; Lewis et al., 2010). More multi-method, observational, and experience sampling studies are needed. Some attention should be given to the means of measuring parent report of children’s emotion regulation and reactions to children’s emotions; the very predominant parent-reported measures used now are certainly yielding interesting results, but a refreshed look at their item content potentially could be helpful. More brave forays are needed into physiological means of examining emotional competence its socialization; bidirectional effects; time series/sequential effects (especially of the connection between emotion, emotion regulation, and strategy effectiveness); and examination of the dyad or triad as a unit in socialization research. Person-centered analyses should be utilized more to paint pictures of whole children, not collections of variables. These suggestions are sizeable challenges, but the exhaustive review of emotional competence research in this chapter suggests that the researchers of today and tomorrow will meet them head on.