Maternal emotion-related socialization and preschoolers' developing emotion self-awareness

Preschoolers' ability to demonstrate awareness of their own emotion is an important socio-emotional competence which has received increasing attention in the developmental literature. The present study examined emotion self-awareness of happiness, sadness, and anger in response to a delay of gratification task in 78 preschool children. Maternal emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs) including reported emotional expressivity, responses to her child's emotions, and observed emotion talk, were examined as predictors of children's emotion self-awareness skill one year later. Results show that, after controlling for receptive language ability, supportive ERSBs were predictive of high self-awareness of happiness whereas non-supportive ERSBs were predictive of low self-awareness of sadness. The results demonstrate that the concordance between observed and self-reported emotion serves as a useful index of children's awareness of their emotional experience.