title: Emotion socialization practices in Italian and Hong Kong-Chinese mothers.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Parents' emotion socialization practices are their ways of handling their children's emotional experiences in light of cultural expectations surrounding emotions. Such practices are thought to significantly affect children's social adjustment. We compared the parenting practices of Italian and Hong Kong Chinese samples in an ethnological validation study of the maternal responses to children's emotion scale (MRCES). Participants were 71 Italian mothers (M = 39.45) and 71 Hong Kong-Chinese mothers (M = 37.75) with children aged 6-9 years.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The results confirmed the two-factor structure identified by the scale's authors, namely coaching/emotion-encouraging and emotion dismissing approaches, respectively. Each of the two factors displayed satisfactory internal consistency. The Chinese mothers obtained higher scores than the Italian mothers on both subscales.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our findings suggested that parents' emotion socialization practices for coping with children's emotions received different degrees of emphasis and were underpinned by different meaning in the Hong Kong and Italian cultural groups. These cultural differences are discussed in relation to their effect on children's socio-emotional development.
authors.affiliation: LUMSA University, P.zza delle Vaschette, 101, 00193 Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Caterina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fiorilli
authors.affiliation: LUMSA University, P.zza delle Vaschette, 101, 00193 Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Simona
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: De Stasio
authors.affiliation: INVALSI, Via Borromini, 5, Frascati, Italy.
authors.forename: Carlo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Di Chicchio
authors.affiliation: Departmento of Psychocological Studies, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Siu Mui
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Chan
keywords: Emotion expression; Emotion socialization; Hong Kong-Chinese mothers; Italian mothers