The relationship between maternal emotional awareness and emition socialization practices

Abstract

This study investigated direct and indirect relations between mothers‘ awareness of their own emotions and children‘s social and emotional competence through their emotion socialization practices. The sample consisted of 106 mothers, their 3-6 year old children and their teachers. A semi-structured interview was initially conducted with a small subsample of mothers (N=31) to delineate the emotion socialization practices of Turkish mothers. In the second step of the study, all mothers filled out an emotion socialization scale and a scale to assess maternal emotional awareness. Mothers and teachers rated children‘s social and emotional competence. Qualitative interview analyses revealed similar themes with the commonly used emotion socialization scale. Distinct emotion socialization practices reflecting the values of the Turkish culture such as emotional interdependence were also discerned. Results of the quantitative analyses revealed that mothers low in emotional awareness used higher levels of nonsupportive emotion socialization practices and rated their children as more labile/negative. Given that maternal education and gender were both significantly associated with nonsupportive practices and mother ratings of child lability/negativity, they were controlled for in the mediation analysis. Nonsupportive emotion socialization practices were found to fully mediate the effect of maternal emotional awareness on child lability/negativity.|Keywords: emotion socialization, emotional awareness, alexithymia, culture.