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...successful linking these processes to certain types of emotional adaptation in children (e.g., Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994; Dunn & Brown, 1994). As a socializing mechanism, this type of discourse assists children in developing a level of emotion understanding (Brown, Donelan-McCall, & Dunn, 1996; Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991), such that they are able to read others' feelings and intentions and to recognize the causes and consequences of feeling states (Cassidy, Parke, Butkovsky, & Braungart, 1992). Discourse about emotions can also be viewed as a tool for teaching children to know the kinds of events that elicit specific emotions and to help them understand the familial and cultural "rules" of emotional expression (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996). Further, by talking to children about their own emotional experiences, parents act as models for how to manage negative emotions (Marion, 1994; Roberts & Strayer, 1987).
It is also essential to recognize that familial emotion talk operates within a larger system. While researchers have found that families who are challenged by chronic economic stress (and the concomitant factors) tend to exhibit a greater level of negative affect (Conger, Ge, Elder, Lorenz, & Simons, 1994) and less responsivity to children's emotional expressions (Martini, Root, & Jenkins, 2004) than families without such stress, less is known about how emotion talk operates within families of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Given the important implications for prevention and early intervention, one of the main objectives of the current study was to examine maternal appraisal styles, or ways that mothers talk about and explain emotional events to their young children, within different contexts of family risk.
In this study, family risk was defined by economic stress, lone-parent and visible minority status. Economic stress and lone-parent status have been disproportionately linked to compromised outcomes in children (Duncan, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanov, 1994; Dunn, Deater-Deckard, Pickering, O'Connor, & Golding, 1998; Elder, Conger, Foster, & Ardelt, 1992; McLoyd, Jayaratne, Ceballo, & Borquez, 1994). Although results for visible minority status are more mixed (Atzaba-Poria, Pike, & Deater-Deckard, 2004) it was included here as a risk variable because it has been linked to mental health difficulties (Aber, Brown, & Jones, 2003) and because it cooccurs with both economic stress and family instability (Beiser, Hou, Hyman, & Tousignant, 1992). These risks have also been linked to angry and coercive parenting (Conger, Ge, Elder, Lorenz, & Simons, 1994; Ho, Bluestein, & Jenkins, submitted) and less prosocial parenting (Jenkins, Rasbash, & O'Connor, 2003). Rather than treating each risk independently, a cumulative index of family risk was formed for the present study because of the evidence showing that environmental risks combine multiplicatively rather than additively to explain socioemotional problems in children (Rutter, 1979; Sameroff, Seifer, & Bartko, 1997). For the current study, it was hypothesized that mothers who scored higher on the risk index would be more likely than lower scoring mothers to utilize angry or hostile appraisals when speaking to their children about emotional events. It was also hypothesized that higher-risk mothers may put less emphasis on the prosocial motivations of others when talking to their children.
Another set of goals of this longitudinal study was to examine whether maternal appraisal styles are related to children's Time 1 and Time 2 emotion biases, and whether specific types of emotion talk would predict a change in children's emotion bias over time amongst those children living in disadvantaged economic circumstances. While genetic influences and information-processing difficulties in children have certainly been implicated as risk factors for children's externalizing outcomes, there is also evidence to suggest that direct parental socialization processes in the home, such as dyadic interaction and direct teaching, play a role in their children's cognitive processes and emotional outcomes. For instance, previous work in social referencing has demonstrated that when young children are faced with everyday, stressful, or aversive events, they often look to parents to find out whether the parent is appraising the event as threatening or not (Walden & Ogan, 1988) with effects evident by the second year of life (Walden & Ogan, 1988).
There are also indications that children's emotions are influenced by the appraisals of people who are close to them. Links between parents and children have been found with regard to hostile appraisal biases and emotions (e.g., Bickett, Milich, & Brown, 1996; Dix & Lochman, 1990). For instance, MacKinnon-Lewis and her colleagues (MacKinnon-Lewis, Lamb, Arbuckle, Baradaran, & Volling, 1992) examined the relationship between maternal and filial hostile attributions about each other, as well as their observed interactions, in a cross-sectional study. Although mother and child hostile attributional biases were not significantly correlated, both maternal and filial hostile attributions were found to be related to coercive mother-child interactions. Indeed, when both the mothers and the sons perceived hostile intent on the part of the other, this resulted in the most aggressive mother-son dyads.
Given these findings, we hypothesized that mothers who modelled a greater amount of hostile appraisals and fewer prosocial appraisals while interacting with their children would have children who exhibited higher levels of anger biases at school. We further hypothesized that the balance between hostile and prosocial maternal appraisals might also be important in explaining children's anger biases.
Two models were tested for the ways in which family risk status and maternal appraisal styles operate together. First, the mediating role of maternal appraisal in the relationship between family risk and children's anger biases was considered. Proximal processes involving parental responses to children's emotions have been found to be associated with the more distal process of economic strain and to partially mediate the relationship between economic strain and children's well-being (e.g., Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1994; Sampson & Laub, 1994), although the extent of this mediation tends to be modest at best (Luthar, 1999). Thus, we examined the possibility that family risk status operated through negative maternal appraisal styles to impact on children's anger biases.
We also tested a moderation model. Many studies have demonstrated that family processes have differing effects as a function of their environmental context (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Rutter & Pickles, 1987). Different types of moderation have been identified. First, a negative family process may be associated with increased child problems in a high-risk context but have no effect in the low-risk context (Jenkins & Smith, 1990). Second, a negative family process may be associated with negative child outcomes in high- and low-risk contexts, with a much greater impact in the high-risk context (Jenkins & Smith, 1990). Third, a negative family process may be associated with negative child outcomes in one context and have an opposite effect in the other context (Deater-Deckard, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1996). Thus, we examined the possibility that the effect of maternal appraisals on children's anger biases would be contingent on whether the child was in a low- or high-risk family environment. We expected that the impact of maternal appraisal would be stronger in the high- than the low-risk context, conforming to the first or second pattern outlined.
Appraisal Models of Emotion
Appraisal models of emotion were used as a conceptual framework and operationalized into an appraisal measure in order to address the aforementioned questions. Appraisal styles, as described by Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale (1978) and Lazarus (1991), are dispositions to appraise ongoing relationships with the environment consistently in one way or another, especially under conditions of ambiguity. Most appraisal models of emotional experience maintain that one of the best predictors of emotional experience is the individual's subjective cognitive appraisal of the event (Scherer, 1999). In other words, emotions are elicited and differentiated on the basis of a person's assessment of how events affect their goals...
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