UC Riverside

Parents’ behaviors surrounding emotions, which broadly encompass responses to children’s emotions, discussion of emotion, and parents’ regulation and expression of their own emotions all serve to inform (i.e., socialize) the child about the appropriate and acceptable ways to experience and share emotions within the family system. These emotion socialization behaviors contribute to a wide variety of child outcomes across the lifespan, including the transmission of emotion socialization practices from parent to child. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate how first-time parents’ self-awareness surrounding their subjective childhood experiences of emotion socialization informed their plans for future emotion socialization practices with their child. Narrative identity methodologies were used to capture how self-awareness of emotion development can be relevant to (a) personal identification of change and stability in facets of emotion development across childhood and adulthood (e.g., remembered childhood experiences, current emotional functioning, etc.), (b) shaping the socialization plans and practices of new parents, and (c) overall psychological well-being.One hundred first-time parents (Mage = 30.14 years, SD = 0.52, 66 mothers) with a child under the age of 3 years participated. Participants completed a survey in which they were asked to reflect on their emotional experiences, both in childhood with their parents and currently as a first-time parent with their own child, by responding to series of open-ended narrative prompts. The narrative prompts captured a sad childhood emotional experience, angry emotional experience, and a turning point in which they recalled wanting to parent their child’s emotions differently than their parents. Individual differences in how first-time parents explored and made meaning of these childhood emotional experiences were conceptualized as self-awareness and used two narrative identity themes: exploratory processing and meaning making. These narrative themes were coded within the narratives of negative childhood emotional experiences. Greater exploratory processing and greater meaning making were expected to relate to planned emotion socialization and wellbeing. To capture well-being, emotional functioning, retrospective socialization practices of their parents in childhood, and their own socialization practices, self-report measures were also administered. Findings revealed that first-time parents’ reported having plans for more supportive and less non-supportive emotion socialization only when they remembered their parents in childhood providing more non-supportive and less supportive emotion socialization. Examination of narrative themes found greater exploratory processing was associated with plans for more supportive reactions, whereas greater meaning making was associated with wellbeing. Remembered emotion socialization was tested as a possible moderator of self-awareness and planned emotion socialization. First, results found that participants who remembered more non-supportive parental reactions and engaged in higher exploratory processing reported plans for less non-supportive reactions. Second, participants who remembered less supportive reactions and illustrated higher meaning making reported plans for less non-supportive reactions. The integration of remembered emotion socialization, exploratory processing, and meaning making predicted plans for optimal emotion socialization practices (more supportive and less non-supportive) in first-time parents. This dissertation illustrated that a multi-method assessment of emotion socialization within and across childhood and adulthood is necessary to understand how the subjective experiences of emotional childhood events contribute to planned emotion socialization as a first-time parent. Finally, the results emphasize how the narrative identity approach can be used in emotion development research to investigate the adaptive implications of self-awareness on emotional functioning and planned emotion socialization.