This special issue consists of 20 articles that focus on issues related to Eisenberg and colleagues' (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Cumberland, 1998) model of emotion socialization processes and its relevance for understanding a range of aspects of children's socioemotional functioning. The various papers…

Based on the goodness-of-fit theory, the current research examined how parental socialization expectations and socialization practices in infancy predicted child social adjustment in the preschool year dependent on child characteristics in toddlerhood with a longitudinal sample of Chinese families. Participants were 272 Chinese mother-child dyads.…

As highlighted by Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad (1998), parents play a critical role in children's socioemotional development, in part, by shaping how children and adolescents process, respond to, and regulate their emotions (i.e., emotional reactivity/regulation). Although evidence for associations between parenting behavior and youth's…

Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad (1998; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Cumberland, 1998) included parent-child attachment as a key dimension of the early emotion socialization environment. We examined processes linking children's early attachment with social regulation and adjustment in preadolescence in 102 community mothers, fathers, and children.…

A fundamental question in developmental science is how parental emotion socialization processes are associated with children's subsequent adaptation. Few extant studies have examined this question across multiple developmental periods and levels of analysis. Here, we tested whether mothers' supportive and nonsupportive reactions to their…

Although research has demonstrated that both parents and peers influence adolescent development, it is not clear whether these relationships also serve as contexts for emotion socialization. In the current longitudinal study, we investigated whether maternal and peer emotion socialization were related to adolescent girls' daily emotions, emotion…

This 4-year, multi-informant longitudinal study (N = 480, initial age: 15) investigated the interplay between parental support, behavioral and psychological control, and adolescents' emotion regulation development. We examined reciprocal effects between parents and children, mothers' versus fathers' unique roles in emotion regulation development,…

Guided by Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad's (1998) conceptual framework, we examined multiple components of maternal emotion socialization (i.e., reactions to children's negative emotion, emotion talk, emotional expressiveness) at 33 months of age as predictors of adolescents' amygdala-vmPFC connectivity and amygdala activation when labeling…

Parents' behaviors--particularly their emotion socialization behaviors (ESBs)--drive children's emotion socialization (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). We propose that a major next step in the effort to promote healthy emotional development is to improve the field's understanding of the most proximal contributor to parent ESBs:…

Maltreated children are susceptible to dysregulation, but developmental mechanisms at the family level that influence this process are understudied. In the current investigation, 4 mediators (positive parenting, positive and negative family expressiveness, and maternal sensitive guidance during reminiscing) were examined as process variables…

The goal of this study was to apply aspects of the heuristic model advanced by Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad (1998) to the study of socialization that takes place in preschool and elementary school classrooms. Investigating socialization in this context is important given the number of hours students spend in school, the emotional nature of…

This study tested child characteristics (temperamental executive control and negative reactivity) and maternal characteristics (parenting behaviors and maternal depressive symptoms) as predictors of a mother's emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs). Further, parenting behaviors and ERSBs were examined as predictors of children's emotion…

Personality traits are well-known predictors of academic success across all levels of education. However, whether school provides an environment to cultivate and promote personality traits is largely unknown. Theories about personality development give reasons to assume that enduring experiences at school could lead to prolonged personality…

Studies conducted in Western countries document the special role of mother--infant face-to-face exchanges for early emotional development including social smiling. A few cross-cultural studies have shown that the Western pattern of face-to-face communication is absent in traditional rural cultures, without identifying other processes that promote…

Research on contemplative practices (e.g., mindfulness or compassion training) is growing rapidly in the clinical, health and neuro-sciences, but almost none of this research takes an explicitly developmental life span perspective. At present, we know rather little about the naturalistic development of mindfulness or compassion in children and…