ABSTRACT
To address this need, we are currently conducting an ongoing set of studies on the ways in which family expressiveness and emotion socialization practices may mediate the negative impact of economic hardship on children's development of effective emotional knowledge, self-regulation and subsequent competence with peers. The following study represents a preliminary examination of children's perceptions of their mothers' emotional expressiveness, collected during a recent follow-up visit with some of the low-income families participating in our research. With these data, our objectives were (1) to explore the nature of low-income children's reports of mothers' emotional expressiveness, using a story-stem technique adapted from Denham (1997) and Roberts and Strayer (1987); (2) to determine whether children's reports of maternal anger and sadness were related to mothers' self-reports of negative emotional expressiveness, using a standardized self-report measure (Halberstadt, Cassidy, Stifter, Parke & Fox, 1995); and finally, (3) to examine relations between a number of poverty-related, ecological stressors and both maternal and child report of mothers' emotional expressiveness.
