This research studies the relations between maternal meta-emotion philosophy, children's meta-emotion philosophy and social competence for preadolescent children of 5th to 6th grader in elementary school and their mothers. For this, this study examine...
This research studies the relations between maternal meta-emotion philosophy, children's meta-emotion philosophy and social competence for preadolescent children of 5th to 6th grader in elementary school and their mothers. For this, this study examines the correlations among variables of maternal meta-emotion philosophy, of children's meta-emotion philosophy and of children's social competence. In addition, this study is aimed to inquire into what effect of maternal meta-emotion philosophy has on children's meta-emotion philosophy and social competence, and also what effect of children's meta-emotion philosophy has on their social competence. To examine above hypothesis, this study conducted correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis of the collected data from questionnaires and semi-structured interview about emotions using PASW Statistics program 18.0.
Forty-three preadolescent children of 5th to 6th grader in elementary school and their mothers were recruited from five elementary schools located in Seoul, Gyeonggi-do and Incheon in South Korea. The measurements used in the study are the following : to measure maternal meta-emotion philosophy, ‘Parental Meta-Emotion Interview(PMEI)’ developed by Katz and Gottman(1986) and ‘Parental Meta-Emotion Coding System’ developed by Katz, Mittman and Hooven(1994), to measure children's meta-emotion philosophy, ‘Child and Adolescent Meta-Emotion Interview(CMEI)’ and ‘Child and Adolescent Meta-Emotion Coding System(CAME)’ developed by Katz and Windecker-Nelson(2002, 2004), and to measure children's social competence, ‘The Teacher-Child Rating Scale(T-CRS)’ developed by Hightower et al(1986).
Results suggest that maternal meta-emotion philosophy exerts a positive effect on several areas of preadolescent children's meta-emotion philosophy as well as preadolescent children's meta-emotion philosophy exercises influence on their social competence. The specific results of the study can be summarized as follows :
First, maternal meta-emotion philosophy, children's meta-emotion philosophy and children's social competence show correlations with one another. First of all, maternal awareness and acceptance of their own emotion are positively correlated with awareness and acceptance of their children's emotion. Secondly, mothers' self-acceptance is positively correlated with their children's emotional regulation, assertive social skills and peer sociability. Also there are significant positive correlations between mothers' self-regulation and children's emotional awareness, regulation and remediation ability. Mothers' acceptance of their children's emotion demonstrates positive correlations with children's emotional regulation as well as with children's frustration tolerance, assertive social skills, work habits and peer sociability, and also negative correlations with conducting and learning problems. Maternal coaching of the children's emotion is positively correlated to children's emotional remediation, but nothing significant with children's social competence. Furthermore, children's own emotional awareness ability shows positive correlation with their assertive social skills, and children's comfort with expression of the emotion level shows positive correlation with their assertive social skills as well as work habits, and also shows negative correlation with shy/anxious problems and learning problems. Lastly, children's emotional regulation is significantly associated with all sub-scales of children's social competence. Children's emotional remediation is positively related to frustration tolerance, work habits, assertive social skills, and has negative correlations with conducting and learning problems.
Second, preadolescent children's emotion regulation is influenced by the maternal self-directed meta-emotion philosophy, not by child-directed meta-emotion philosophy. With a higher level of mother's self-acceptance and regulation, children yield a higher ability of their emotional regulation. On the other hand, the children's emotional remediation is influenced by maternal child-directed meta-emotion philosophy. With a higher level of maternal acceptance of their child's emotion, children show a greater ability of emotional remediation.
Third, children's meta-emotion philosophy has a partially meaningful influence on their social competence. Especially, with higher emotional regulation ability, they have greater assertive social skills, work habits, peer sociability and lower shy/anxious, learning problems. And also with more comfort with expression of emotion, they have lower shy/anxious problems.
Forth, in the study, there are partially meaningful correlation between maternal meta-emotion philosophy and children's social competence, but not revealed significant causal relation of two factors. The possible reasons for these unexpected results were discussed with the various points of view.
In conclusion, the preadolescent children's meta-emotion philosophy is influenced by maternal meta-emotion philosophy as well as greatly effects on their social competence. This results suggest the necessity of an education program for preadolescent children and mothers to handle their meta-emotion philosophy. Furthermore, the result can be used as an important basic material in developing such education programs for them.
|
