Date of Graduation

2013

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate how parents’ perceptions of, feelings toward, and anticipated responses to children’s emotions related to parents’ meta-emotion philosophy (MEP) and attachment. Parents (mothers and fathers) completed an online research study where they viewed photographs of children (aged 10-14 years) displaying varying intensities of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and neutral expressions. Parents labeled the emotion and identified the emotion’s intensity, their own emotion, and their anticipated responses. They also completed measures assessing their MEP and attachment. Results were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The model for MEP predicting happiness did not fit well, but the model predicting negative emotion indicated that greater emotion-coaching (EC, a component of MEP) predicted greater accuracy in labeling emotions and a greater likelihood to interact with children. Models for attachment had good fit. Results for happiness indicated that greater avoidance predicted lower intensity ratings and less arousal, willingness to interact, and supportive responses. Greater anxiety predicted higher intensity ratings and greater arousal, willingness to interact, and supportive responses. Results for negative emotion demonstrated that mothers higher in anxiety were higher in arousal and mothers higher in avoidance were lower in arousal. Results offer new evidence that parents’ ratings on a standardized emotion perception task are predicted by individual differences in their attachment and MEP.

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