Maternal emotional expressiveness and preschool children's understanding of love

Abstract

Maternal emotional expressiveness was examined for its associations with preschool children's understanding of love (N = 22). Emotional expressiveness was assessed from mothers completing the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire and mothers being observed during drop-off and pick-up time in preschool. Results show that maternal emotional expressiveness as assessed by the questionnaire was negatively associated with children's understanding of love, whereas maternal emotional expressiveness as assessed from the observations was positively associated with children's understanding of love. Also, maternal emotional expressiveness was positively associated with boys', but negatively with girls' understanding of love. Findings are discussed in terms of extending the research foci of present studies on children's emotion understanding to include the emotion love.