Mothers' emotional arousal as a moderator in the socialization of children's empathy.
Overall, our findings suggest that the moderating effects of maternal affective arousal in the socialization of children's empathic responding are complex. On the one hand, at low levels of mothers' affective intensity, positive relations were found between children's sad facial reactions and mothers' prosocial suggestions. At the highest levels of affective responding, however, mothers' altruistic responding was significantly and positively related to children's sad facial responses, and mothers' altruism and inductive reasoning was negatively related to children's distressed facial reactions (Table 2). The negative relation of mothers' inductions and altruistic responding to children's facial distress reactions at high levels of mothers' affective responding could be interpreted to mean that these practices are associated with decreases in children's personal distress reactions to distressed peers (that is, with decreases in one's focus on one's own negative feelings). However, the positive relations between mothers' inductions and altruistic responding and children's facial distress reactions at low levels of mothers' emotional responding could support the interpretation of facial distress reactions as vicarious emotional responses. The affective response depicted by the children in the empathy films involved physical distress, so a purely vicarious affective (that is, empathic) response might be expected to be expressed facially as a distressed reaction. Thus, the variability in the results regarding children's facial distress reactions suggests that to interpret them as an index of either empathy or personal distress requires considering the nature of the empathy stimulus and may ultimately require assessing additional criterion variables (for example, examining the relation of facial distress reactions to actual prosocial behavior). Results not found in previous research were that high-intensity parental affect combined with negative control practices was associated with a lessening of children's sympathetic orientations, whereas situational definitions were positively associated with children's facial distress reactions to peer distress. The variability in these findings may be explained, in part, by the interpretation that parental affect may potentiate the impact of the semantic content of parental messages to the child. That is, if the content of the message is inductive, the mother's intense affect may heighten the meaningfulness of the relation between the child's behavior and its consequences for the peer's situation or feelings (unless, of course, the parent overwhelms the child with information).
Miller
P A
PA
Eisenberg
N
N
Fabes
R A
RA
Shell
R
R
Gular
S
S
D000533:Altruism; D001143:Arousal; D002668:Child Rearing; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004644:Emotions; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D012951:Socialization