关键词: 父母元情绪理念, 父母情绪反应, 学前儿童, 社会适应, 中介作用

Abstract: Abstract Family is the first community for children's socialization. Through family interaction, children learn to express and manage emotions and master social skills. Therefore, family emotion socialization plays a significant role in the process of children's social adjustment. Family emotion socialization mainly refers to the parental emotion socialization. Previous studies have shown that parental meta-emotional philosophy (emotional socialization philosophy) plays an important role in predicting children's social adjustment. From parental meta-emotional philosophy to children's social adjustment, researchers have paid more attention to “passive” or unintentional emotion socialization practices such as parental emotional expressiveness, while more "positive" or direct emotion socialization practices such as parental reactions to emotions, especially negative emotion, received less attention. On the one hand, the path from parental meta-emotional philosophy to the negative emotional response to children, and then to children's social adjustment, need more empirical evidence to confirm the validity; on the other hand, the roles of father and mother in the process of children's growth are different, mother spend more time nurturing her children, while father plays the role of playmate. However, as we enter the industrialized society, father also bears more and more responsibility for parenting. Whether father and mother have similar effects on children need further confirmation. In view of this, a longitudinal study was conducted to explore whether parental reactions to emotions acted as a mediator between their meta-emotional philosophy and children's social adjustment. A total of 459 preschooler were recruited from five kindergartens and participated in this study. They were followed up for two years from small class to middle class. The Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy Scale were used to measure parental meta-emotional philosophy. The Coping With Children's Negative Emotions Scale were used to measure parental reactions to emotions. The Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation Scale were used to measure children’s social adjustment. The main results were as follows: (1)maternal emotion-coaching have a significant and positive impact on expressive encouragement and problem-focused reactions, having a significant and negative impact on distress reactions; maternal emotion- dismissing have a significant and positive impact on distress、punitive and minimization reactions, having a significant and negative impact on emotion-focused reactions; paternal emotion-coaching have a significant and positive impact on emotion-focused and problem-focused reactions; (2)maternal expressive encouragement positively predict children’s angry-aggressive and anxious-withdrawal behavior; maternal problem-focused and minimization reactions positively predict sensitive-cooperative; maternal distress reactions positively predict anxious-withdrawal behavior, negatively predict sensitive-cooperative; paternal problem-focused reactions positively predict sensitive-cooperative; (3)maternal expressive encouragement at wave 2 plays a complete mediator role between emotion-coaching at wave 1 and angry-aggressive and anxious-withdrawal behavior at wave 2; maternal problem-focused reactions at wave 2 plays a complete mediator role between emotion-coaching at wave 1 and sensitive-cooperative at wave 2; maternal distress reactions at wave 2 plays a complete mediator role between emotion-coaching and emotion- dismissing at wave 1 and sensitive-cooperative and anxious-withdrawal behavior at wave 2; paternal problem-focused reactions at wave 2 plays a complete mediator role between emotion-coaching at wave 1 and sensitive-cooperative at wave 2. Our findings indicate that parental meta-emotion philosophy influence children's social adjustment by affecting their reactions to children's negative emotions. In the research of children's social adjustment, parental emotion socialization can be distinguished from more global parenting variables such as warmth, disengagement and hostility. These parenting variables describe the general interaction in parent-child relationships. The research between parental parenting and children's social adjustment is refined, and a more detailed guidance can be provided for parents to bring up children.

Key words: Parental meta-emotion philosophy, Parental Reactions to Emotions, Preschooler, Social adjustment, Mediating effects