ABSTRACT
Although a number of researchers (Baumrind, 1989; Greenberger & Goldberg, 1989), theorists (Dix, 1991; Patterson, 1982; Wahler & Dumas, 1987), and clinicians (Anastopoulos & Barkley, 1989; Barkley, 1985) have been interested in how parents respond to their children's negative behaviors, relatively little focus has been placed on parental responses to children's negative emotional displays (Fabes, Leonard, Kupanoff, & Martin, 2001). Even when there has been interest, most of the interest has been limited to whether children's emotions should be encouraged or restricted. For example, Tomkins (Tomkins, 1962,1963) hypothesized that parental acceptance rather than suppression of children's negative emotions would be beneficial to children. Likewise, Leavitt and Power (1989) observed day care workers and parents and noted how the emotional expressions of preschoolers often were minimized. They postulated that this lack of emotional encouragement leads to decreased emotional understanding. Similarly, Buck (1984) hypothesized that children punished for affect expressions learn to hide their outward expression of emotions but become physically aroused in situations that involve emotion. Halberstadt and colleagues (Halberstadt, 1983; Halberstadt, 1986; Halberstadt, Cassidy, Stifter, Parke, & Fox, 1995) argued that greater parental emotional expressiveness would lead to greater expressiveness in children. Beyond acceptance and restrictiveness of children's emotions, however, we know relatively little about how parents respond to children's negative emotions and the con-
sequences of these responses for children's socio-emotional outcomes. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the psychometric properties of a scale designed to fill the gap in this literature-namely, the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES; Fabes, Eisenberg, & Bernzweig, 1990a).
