Preschool teachers' socialization of emotion knowledge: Considering socioeconomic Risk

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Highlights

Teachers':

  • Minimizing reactions contributed positively to preschoolers' emotion knowledge (EK)

  • Punitive reactions to emotion contributed negatively to preschoolers' EK

  • Talk about negative emotions predicted EK for preschoolers at risk

  • Positive expressiveness and emotion coaching predicted EK for preschoolers at risk

  • Punitive reactions predicted EK for preschoolers not at risk

Abstract

Emotion knowledge supports early school success. Socializers' emotions, contingent reactions to emotions, emotion language, and beliefs about emotions can contribute to preschoolers' emotion knowledge, but more is known about parents' contributions than teachers'. We expected teachers' emotion socialization findings to parallel those in the parent literature, with potential moderation by classroom-level socioeconomic risk. Participants included 85 teachers and 327 preschoolers in high or low socioeconomic risk classrooms. Children's emotion knowledge was assessed twice. Teachers reported on emotional expressiveness, reactions to children's emotions, and emotion socialization beliefs. Their emotion language during book reading was codified. Hierarchical linear models predicted end-of-year emotion knowledge via emotion socialization, risk, and their interactions, controlling for child age, gender, and beginning-of-year emotion knowledge. Only one finding resembled the parent literature; most were specific to high socioeconomic risk classrooms, highlighting the importance of context in emotion socialization. Applications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are considered.

Introduction

Emotion knowledge, at the preschool level, consists of accurately identifying expressions of emotions, as well as increasingly complex comprehension of situations that elicit emotions and their causes. Such knowledge is identified as important support for early school success and the growth of academic competence during elementary school (Nix, Bierman, Domitrovich, & Gill, 2013). Children who better understand emotions in preschool and at school entry are more likely to (a) develop positive and supportive relationships with peers and teachers, (b) demonstrate positive learning behaviors/attitudes and social competence, and (c) achieve at higher levels throughout early schooling; children not attaining such knowledge are at risk in these areas (Blankson et al., 2017; Denham et al., 2012; Denham et al., 2012; Di Maggio, Zappulla, & Pace, 2016; Garner & Waajid, 2008; Izard et al., 2001; Miller et al., 2006). In short, emotion knowledge helps to ensure children's early school success, and its effects may be long lasting. In fact, kindergarten prosociality (including emotion knowledge) is associated with adult success in education, employment, mental health, and avoidance of crime and substance use, independent of important child, family, and contextual factors (Jones, Greenberg, & Crowley, 2015).

Fueled in part by this evidence, educators, parents, and policymakers are becoming ever more aware of the need to address emotion knowledge in early childhood educational settings and training (Buettner, Hur, Jeon, & Andrews, 2016; Dusenbury et al., 2015; O'Conner, De Feyter, Carr, Luo, & Romm, 2017). To support these initiatives, more research is warranted on the promotion of emotion knowledge in early educational contexts.

Thus, given its importance, how is such emotion knowledge fostered? The components of emotion socialization theory include socializers' expressed emotions, contingent reactions to specific emotions, teaching about emotions, and beliefs about emotions, which help young children acquire culturally appropriate emotion knowledge (Denham, 2019; Denham, Bassett, & Wyatt, 2014; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). Most of what we know about these mechanisms emanates from studying families.

First, children observe emotions exhibited by people with whom they interact. The modeling mechanism of emotion socialization includes specific positive and negative emotions observed by children along with socializers' overall emotional expressiveness. Family positive expressiveness (e.g., happiness, gratitude) promotes emotion knowledge, perhaps rendering young children more open to learning about emotions; conversely, exposure to negative emotions (e.g., sadness, anger) may hamper emotion knowledge by upsetting children, making self-reflection about emotion difficult (Nixon & Watson, 2001; Raver & Spagnola, 2002).

Second, children's emotions often elicit, even require, contingent reactions from social partners. Adults respond to young children's emotions in ways that have been construed as either supportive (e.g., accepting, comforting) or nonsupportive (e.g., minimizing, punishing). These reactions convey important messages about emotions, bearing on preschoolers' emotion knowledge (Perlman, Camras, & Pelphrey, 2008; Pintar Breen, Tamis-LeMonda, & Kahana-Kalman, 2018). Supportive reactions to children's emotions may help children differentiate emotions, perhaps by making the child feel more comfortable to explore emotions and affording them practice in successfully dealing with them. In contrast, nonsupportive reactions may motivate children to avoid emotional information (Denham & Kochanoff, 2002).

Third, teaching about emotion consists of verbally commenting upon or explaining an emotion and its relation to an observed event or expression. Adults' discussions about emotions promote children's emotion knowledge, perhaps by directing attention to salient emotional cues and giving children reflective distance from their feelings so that they can better interpret and evaluate feelings' causes and consequences (Denham, Mitchell-Copeland, Strandberg, Auerbach, & Blair, 1997; Doan & Wang, 2010; Garner, Dunsmore, & Southam-Gerrow, 2008). The general trend of these findings also is found for low-income, minority families (Garner, 2006).

Finally, beliefs about how to socialize emotional competence underlie emotion socialization behaviors, and may contribute to young children's emotion knowledge, (Halberstadt et al., 2013; Halberstadt, Thompson, Parker, & Dunsmore, 2008; Wong, Diener, & Isabella, 2008; Wong, McElwain, & Halberstadt, 2009). For example, parents who value teaching about emotions may approach children's emotions by coaching (e.g., using children's feelings as teachable moments and opportunities to talk about emotions' causes and consequences; Dunsmore & Karn, 2001; Parker et al., 2012; Paterson et al., 2012). Conversely, adults who consider emotions problematic may approach children's emotions more negatively (e.g., trying to get children to stop showing emotions by punishing them, or minimizing emotions through inattention), so that children learn only to suppress emotions (Denham & Kochanoff, 2002; Perlman et al., 2008). Alternatively, emotion socialization beliefs may lean toward a more laissez-faire attitude about emotion (e.g., not really knowing how to respond to children's emotions), leading to restricted input about emotions (Perez Rivera & Dunsmore, 2011).

In short, the extant literature has shown that families' emotional lives contribute much to preschoolers' emerging emotion knowledge. Children's daily experiences today usually include other contexts and other important adults, however, especially their teachers in childcare or preschool. What is known, then, about how teachers' emotion socialization contributes to developing emotion knowledge?

Young children could also learn about emotions through their rich daily interactions with teachers (e.g., Bassett, Denham, Mohtasham, & Austin, in press; Hyson, 1994). Even when not directly involved in interaction, they may learn about emotions through observing teachers. Thus, preschool teachers may be pivotal socializers of children's emotion knowledge (Denham, Bassett, & Zinsser, 2012). Teachers' emotions, reactions, and teaching about emotions, undergirded by beliefs, are likely to send socialization messages to children like those encountered in the family, contributing to children's emotional competence in similar ways. However, contextual differences also point to potentially unique contributions of teacher emotion socialization—the adult/child ratio in the classroom, for example, and concomitant need for organization, may dictate teachers' stricter reactions to emotions (Denham & Bassett, 2019). Teachers also may feel the need to project an emotionally calm demeanor in the classroom, despite the often-stressful nature of their work (Shewark, Zinsser, & Denham, 2018). But there still is relatively little evidence on how early childhood educators socialize emotional competence (Denham, Bassett, & Zinsser, 2012).

Accordingly, in this study we seek to expand this small literature, examining teachers' contributions to preschoolers' emotion knowledge. First, though, we should examine the sparse evidence that corroborates the potential importance of preschool teachers' emotion socialization. Early childhood teachers engage in a wide variety of specific emotion socialization behaviors in the classroom (Ahn & Stifter, 2006; Ersay, 2007). They show emotion, including both anger and joy (Fu, Lin, Syu, & Guo, 2010). They also encourage and discourage young children's emotional expression via a variety of behaviors, such as comforting, distraction, problem-solving, punishment, or minimization, but infrequently validate children's emotions (e.g., “it's okay to feel sad”; Ahn, 2005b; Ahn & Stifter, 2006). Concerning relations with emotion knowledge, teachers' negative reactions were negatively related to older preschoolers' emotion knowledge (Morris, Denham, Bassett, & Curby, 2013).

Regarding teaching about emotions, early childhood teachers also use emotion language in the classroom, although relatively infrequently (Ahn, 2005a; 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”). In addition, their book reading is a noteworthy outlet for emotion socialization that can promote children's emotion knowledge. For example, when teachers explain causes and consequences of story characters' emotions (e.g., “Do you think she is sad because the ball fell in the river?”), children's emotion knowledge increases across a school year (Bassett, Denham, Mohtasham, & Austin, 2020). Moreover, when teachers read books including an enriched emotional lexicon, and then converse about them, children show growth in emotion knowledge (Grazzani, Ornaghi, Agliati, & Brazzelli, 2016; see also Bergman Deitcher, Aram, Khalaily-Shahadi, & Dwairy, 2020, for concordant cross-cultural results). Finally, regarding early childhood teachers' beliefs about emotions, Ahn (2005a) noted that her observations of Korean early childhood educators showed congruence between their emotion-related beliefs and emotion socialization behaviors.

We seek to extend these initial theoretical and empirical efforts. Hence, our overarching goal for the current study was to further understand teachers' emotion socialization in preschool classrooms, by examining teachers' self-reported emotion socialization (i.e., emotions, reactions to children's emotions, beliefs) and directly observing their emotion language during picturebook reading. Knowing how preschool teachers' emotion socialization is related to children's developing emotion knowledge could inform practice recommendations and professional development.

Thus, understanding teacher emotion socialization is an important goal, but it may be an incomplete one. Over and above elucidating teachers' emotion socialization attitudes and behaviors, attention must be paid to contextual issues that can be critical in the development of preschoolers' emotion knowledge. Socioeconomic status is one such contextual issue. For example, poverty's stressors prominently include parents' struggle to pay bills and “make ends meet.” These stressors may elicit overwhelming, negative emotions within the family, rendering children's acquisition of emotion knowledge more difficult (Denham, Bassett, Mincic, et al., 2012; Denham, Bassett, Zinsser, & Wyatt, 2014; National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2005/2014; Raver et al., 2015). Specifically, children's ability to detect and appraise emotional stimuli is greater in the absence of environmental adversities such as poverty, household chaos, and interparental aggression (Raver et al., 2015; see also Erhart, Dmitrieva, Blair, & Kim, 2019).

Socioeconomic risk also can be related to differences in emotion socialization in the family, via the emotional climate that poverty can induce. For example, the stress of living in poverty understandably can dampen maternal positive expressiveness, even controlling for depression (Davis, Suveg, & Shaffer, 2015). At the same time, such stress may exacerbate mothers' punitive or dismissing reactions to children's emotions (Shaffer, Suveg, Thomassin, & Bradbury, 2012). If living in poverty makes it difficult for parents to demonstrate positive emotion socialization, could early experiences with teachers buffer such effects? Indeed, low-income children are especially sensitive to quality social-emotional programming, with advantageous promotion of their emotional competence (Fishbein et al., 2016; Nix et al., 2013). Thus, we argue that teacher emotion socialization may be especially important for children living in poverty.

In considering socioeconomic risk, it is important to recognize that teachers' emotion socialization is conveyed to their entire classrooms. Even when not the target of a teachers' expressiveness, reactions, emotion language, and beliefs (or when there is no specific target for these components of emotion socialization), each child is exposed to and arguably learns about emotions. Thus, in this initial examination of teachers' emotion socialization, socioeconomic risk, as it moderates such classroom-level emotion socialization, is operationalized as attendance in a classroom serving low-income families. We classify each classroom, then, as either at high or low socioeconomic risk depending on program target population.

Building from these considerations, the overarching goal of the present study focused on the contribution of teachers' emotion socialization behaviors to children's emotion knowledge. In accordance with findings from extant parent emotion socialization literature, we expect that self-reported positive and negative emotional expressiveness, along with supportive and unsupportive reactions to children's emotions, language used to teach about emotion, and attitudes about emotion socialization will contribute to children's year-end emotion knowledge, over and above earlier emotion knowledge. Thus, we expect that teachers' positive expressiveness would be positively related to children's emotion knowledge, helping them to become receptive to learning about emotions. In contrast, teacher negativity would create an atmosphere where addressing emotions would be difficult. Further, it is expected that teachers' supportive reactions to children's emotions – encouraging, comforting, helping – would be positively related to children's emotion knowledge, with the converse true for their punishing or minimizing reactions. Supportive responses from teachers would help children “stay in the moment” to learn more about emotions. It is also expected that teachers who discuss emotions when reading picturebooks convey content to children about emotions. Finally, teachers' beliefs about coaching emotions will contribute to children's emotion knowledge.

However, given little extant research and important contextual differences in classrooms versus families (e.g., dealing with multiple rather than individual children), we cannot rule out unique teacher contributions to children's emotion knowledge. Teachers' roles differ from parents'; they may see themselves as readying preschoolers to function in a school setting, using a more “no nonsense” approach, perhaps including pressure for children to minimize emotional outbursts, so that classroom order can be maintained. In the classroom context, such emotion socialization might support development of emotion knowledge via focusing children's attention.

Further, contributions of classroom-level teacher emotion socialization may be especially important to developing emotion knowledge for children living in poverty. In particular, given these children's greater risk of exposure to parents' frustration, anger, and proneness to losing emotional control (Raver et al., 2015), children living in poverty may especially benefit from learning about emotions within an emotionally positive, coaching environment (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2005/2014). At the same time, they also may benefit from a stricter, less “coddling”, approach to their emotions, reflective of the increased need to regulate emotions in their environment (Dunbar, Leerkes, Coard, Supple, & Calkins, 2017).

Thus, our first research question is: How does teachers' self-reported emotion socialization and discussion about emotions contribute to young children's emotion knowledge over the preschool year? Our second research question is: How do contributions of teachers' emotion socialization vary by the socioeconomic risk status of their classrooms?

Section snippets

Participants

Participants included 85 teachers and 327 children in three- and four-year-old classroom (mage = 48.10, sdage = 7.22; 54% boys). Children attended privatized (i.e., private or university-based) child care (ncenters = 20 nteachers = 66; nchildren = 240; termed “low socioeconomic risk”. On average less than 15% of students in each center received subsidized care) or government- or church-sponsored centers (ncenters = 3; nteachers = 19; nchildren = 87; termed “high socioeconomic risk”. To be

Descriptive statistics and correlations

Table 1, Table 2, Table 3 show descriptive statistics and intercorrelations. As can be seen in Table 1, teachers self-reported relatively positive emotions, positive rather than negative reactions to children's emotions, and prevalent attitudes endorsing both emotion coaching and dismissing children's emotions (i.e., merely accepting their negative emotions). In terms of the picturebook reading task, across two books, there were moderate numbers of emotion words used, with the predominant

Discussion

These findings shed light on how teacher emotion socialization contributes to individual differences in preschoolers' emotion knowledge. Teacher emotion socialization, especially as moderated by classroom socioeconomic risk, often predicted emotion knowledge, independent of child covariates, including children's beginning-of-year emotion knowledge. Importantly, only one finding resembled the parent emotion socialization literature, and one appeared unique to the preschool environment; most were

Acknowledgements

The present study was funded by Institute of Education Sciences.

Grant award R305A110 730 from the Institute for Education Sciences and R21HD068744 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We are grateful to the teachers who participated in this study, and the directors of the facilities who so cooperatively worked with us, and especially the children who enthusiastically took part. We also thank Dr. Tim Curby, Nila Austin, Craig Bailey, Nicole Fettig, Grace Howarth,

Declarations of Competing Interest

None.

Credit author statement

Preschool Teachers' Socialization of Emotion Knowledge: Considering Parent Socialization and Socioeconomic Risk.

Susanne Denham: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing (Original Draft), Funding acquisition

David Ferrier: Investigation, Writing – Review and Editing, Project Administration.

Hideko Bassett: Investigation, Writing – Review and Editing, Project Administration.

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