In the 60s of the 20th century, the research on children's socialization began to focus on children's emotional development, and parental emotional socialization as the most important source of influence on children's emotional development naturally attracted extensive attention from researchers. The so-called emotional socialization of parents refers to the parents' response to children's emotional experience, expression, and regulation of concepts, goals, and values in behavior.
In the past six decades, researchers have carried out rich theoretical and empirical research on parents' emotional socialization and child development, and agree that the direct impact of parental emotional socialization on children's development includes at least four aspects: emotional teaching, talking about emotions, emotional expression, and emotional response.
Among them, parental emotional response refers to the parents' real-time response attitude and behavior in the face of random emotional expression in children's daily life. Compared with other ways, parents' emotional response is the most frequent in daily parent-child emotional interaction, which is the most direct and typical way to affect children's emotional development. In recent decades, foreign countries have accumulated rich research on parents' emotional response and children's emotional development.
From the perspective of emotional parenting, the influence of parents on children's emotional development is discussed from the perspective of parent-child interaction, and the natural nurturing of children's emotional abilities is emphasized by parents' concepts, attitudes and behaviors. Among them, the theoretical ideas of Johnny Gottman and Nancy Eisenberg are the most influential.
Johnny Gottman's team first proposed the concept of parental meta-emotion on the basis of meta-emotion theory, that is, a series of organized thinking patterns formed by parents on their own and their children's emotions, which contains three core components: sensitivity to self and children's emotions, acceptance and teaching awareness.
In this theoretical model, the meta-emotional concept of parents is the basis of parents' emotional response behavior, which directly determines the interactive behaviors such as parents' support, praise, and recognition of children's emotions.
There are three main types of parents' meta-emotional concepts: First, emotional elimination parents, this type of parents believe that negative emotions are harmful to their children, and are more inclined to use response methods such as neglect or denial, so as to keep children away from these harmful emotions as soon as possible.
The second is emotional disorder, that is, parents can not adapt to their own and children's emotions, can not calm their emotions well, in the face of their children's negative emotions, the intensity of parents' own negative emotions is even higher than their children.
The third is the emotional teaching type, which parents can be keenly aware of their own and their children's emotions, and support children's emotional development through a variety of constructive strategies. Empirical studies confirm that children raised by emotionally taught parents have better emotional and social competence than the first two types.
Nancy Eisenberg, another influential researcher in the field of parental emotional socialization, believes that parents' emotional responses affect the development of children's emotional abilities through the mediation of children's emotional arousal levels. Specifically, parents' non-supportive responses will trigger children's negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, and anger, causing children to over-arous, and then show two extreme states of excessive inhibition or loss of control.
The excessive arousal of emotions makes it difficult for children to control the intensity, duration and frequency of their emotional expression, and then they are prone to a series of problems such as excessive self and behavior control in social interaction, showing low emotional and social ability.
On the contrary, parental supportive responses can make children's emotions moderately aroused, so that children are more likely to get rid of emotional shackles and focus more on the social situation itself, so as to effectively solve the problem.
Under this theoretical assumption, Nancy Eisenberg's team further defined that parental supportive emotional response includes three ways: encouraging expression, emotional attention and problem concern; Parents' non-supportive emotional responses include punishment, neglect, and sadness.
Since Nancy Eisenberg proposed this theoretical model in the nineties of the last century, a large number of empirical studies have confirmed that parents' supportive emotional responses are indeed more conducive to the good development of their children's emotional and social abilities than non-supportive emotional responses.
Carol Maratsta is based on functionalism and discrete emotion theory, which treats emotions as a mental event.
He pointed out that emotions are the individual's adaptation to the biological and social environment, each emotion as a continuous existence has its own special and unique function, and the individual's processing of emotions is the most prominent part of personality.
How are the characteristics of an individual's emotional processing integrated into the personality? Carol Maratsta believes that emotional interaction between parents and children in early family parenting is key. In parent-child emotional interaction, certain emotional states of children are continuously strengthened due to high-frequency interaction, gradually consolidated, and finally integrated into self-awareness and become part of the personality structure.
And those emotional states that are selectively ignored will gradually weaken, and eventually be forced to split or withdraw from individual experience. Each discrete emotion has its own unique function in individual growth, and when each emotional state of children can get appropriate responses in parent-child interaction, children's emotional development will achieve healthy development.
But if parents selectively raise children in a certain emotional state and do not encourage or abandon other emotions, this will lead to two types of deformities in children: one is overdevelopment, that is, a certain emotion dominates; The second is underdevelopment, that is, the absence of a certain emotion.
Both states can cause certain defects in the child's personality or more serious deformities, such as psychopathological problems. Therefore, this theory is supposed to not only reveal the process mechanism of individual emotional health development, but also elaborate the development mechanism of some children's emotional adjustment disorders.
Based on this theory, Carol Maratsta constructed 5 parenting emotional response strategies: first, rewards, such as comforting children when they are sad and supporting children when they are afraid; The second is amplification, parents show the same emotional state as their children; the third is neglect, that is, the deliberate neglect of the child's emotional state; The fourth is punishment, such as parents making fun of their children's fears, disapproving of their children's sadness, etc.; Fifth, contempt, parents are dismissive of their children's emotional performance, such as telling children not to be afraid.
Different from the perspective of emotional upbringing, the perspective of discrete emotion theory emphasizes that each discrete emotion has an irreplaceable importance for children's development, and once parents do not properly grasp the intensity or frequency of children's certain emotions, it will lead to insufficient or excessive children's emotional expression, which in turn will lead to children's emotional development and social adaptation problems.
In this sense, parents cannot define the best response to children's emotional responses, only the most compatible response strategies.
Although more and more empirical studies in the past two decades have confirmed that the medium of parents' emotional response and children's emotional development is children's emotional arousal state, how does the emotional arousal state develop? The issue remains vague.
Recently, Patricia Tan explained the occurrence of emotional arousal states in Eisenberg's theoretical model through the neural activity process of human emotion regulation.
He believes that the neural basis of emotion regulation lies in two parts: one is the neural network that processes the most prominent information in emotions; The second is some sub-processes, which contain automatic and implicit emotion regulation neural networks.
These two neural networks correspond to the corresponding regions in the brain, and the brain regions corresponding to the prominent information detection mostly overlap with them, indicating that this neural network is an integrated region.
The researchers reviewed many empirical studies on parental style, parental emotional socialization and children's neural activity, and the results confirmed that parents' emotional socialization caused changes in the structure and function of brain neural network regions related to the above three emotion regulation processes, thereby controlling children's emotional arousal, and finally realizing changes in children's emotional regulation ability.
It can be seen that tracing the mechanism of parental emotional response to children's emotional development from the perspective of the neural network basis of children's emotion regulation is an effective and promising approach. In the future, with the help of increasingly mature brain science research technology, relevant empirical research and theoretical analysis can be strengthened, so as to more clearly verify the internal mechanism of the relationship between the two.
From the perspective of family system theory, the multiple influence paths of parents' emotional response on children's emotional development were further verifiedIn the relationship between parents' emotional response and children's emotional development, culture, gender, and age are the regulators that researchers pay more attention to. However, most current studies only examine the separate effects of one or two influencing factors on the relationship between the two in isolation.
In fact, as an organized ecological aggregate, the family contains many sub-aggregates, such as parents' marriage relationship, parent-child relationship, brother and sister relationship, material environment, etc. For children, each subsystem in the family interacts to influence their emotional development.
Therefore, in the future, it is very necessary to further verify the separate and cross-effects of multiple factors in the family on the relationship between the two from the perspective of family system theory, so as to expand the multiple paths of the relationship between the two, such as the quality of parents' marriage, parenting style, parents' different emotional socialization pathways, parent-child attachment, family member relationship, sibling relationship quality, material environment, etc.
In fact, sporadic studies have attempted to explore the role of more parents' emotional responses on children's emotional development. For example, studies have confirmed that the sibling relationship has a decisive effect on the relationship between the two.
Another longitudinal study on 6~9-year-old children explored the influence of the chaos of the family environment on the relationship between the two, and the results showed that the chaos of the family environment is a buffer between the parents' non-supportive response and the emotional regulation ability of 6-year-old children, while for 9-year-old children, in the family environment of high chaos, the emotional response of parents and the development of children's emotional regulation ability do not seem to be strongly correlated.
There is no doubt that the two-way interaction process between parents' emotional response and children's emotional development is a process of mutual influence. Children are subjective and active people, and the development of children's social skills and social behavior will affect the development process of the father's own emotional socialization.
Recently, some researchers selected a sample of 3-5-year-old children to explore in detail the impact of dynamic synchronous interaction of positive emotions between parents and children on the relationship between parents' emotional responses and children's emotions.
The results show that although the dynamic synchronous interaction of positive emotions between parents and children does not have a mediating effect, it plays an indirect role, and the degree of synchronous interaction of positive emotions between parents and children may be the point of effect on whether parents' emotional socialization can have an effect on children's emotional development. From this point of view, the importance of dynamic emotional interaction between parents and children may be far greater than researchers think.