ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the several studies that have explored the ways in which parents discuss past emotional experiences with their preschool children, and how children are learning to understand and interpret their emotional experiences through participating in these conversations. It also discusses the issue of the emotionality of everyday events, and discuss developmental relationships between understanding events, emotions, and self. Social factors are equally important influences on emotional experience. According to Lewis and Michaelson, socialization plays a powerful role in shaping the content of emotional experience. Parents and children begin engaging in conversations about past experiences virtually as soon as children begin talking. The fact that there are no longitudinal relations between children's use of emotion language and their mother's subsequent use of emotion language further suggests that it is mothers who are primarily responsible for the relations between maternal and child emotion language at the last time point.
