J. Kuebli et al., MOTHER-CHILD TALK ABOUT PAST EMOTIONS - RELATIONS OF MATERNAL LANGUAGE AND CHILD GENDER OVER TIME, Cognition and emotion, 9(2-3), 1995, pp. 265-283
Emotional understanding and expression is largely constructed in socio
cultural contexts; thus examination of the ways in which parents talk
about emotions with their young children is critical for understanding
emotional socialisation. In this longitudinal research, 18 white, mid
dle-class mothers and their preschool children discussed salient past
events when the children were 40, 58, and 70 months of age. Analyses r
evealed that mothers talked more about emotions and talked about a gre
ater variety of emotions with daughters than with sons. Mothers also f
ocused more on negative emotions with daughters than with sons. Althou
gh there were no gender differences between girls and boys at the begi
nning of the study, by the last phase, girls talked more about emotion
and about a greater variety of emotion than did boys and also initiat
ed more emotion-related discussions than did boys. Results are discuss
ed in relation to a growing body of evidence on gender and emotion acr
oss the life span.