Janet Kuebli

Mother-child talk about past emotions: Relations of maternal language and child gender over time

Abstract Emotional understanding and expression is largely constructed in sociocul-tural contexts; thus examination of the ways in which parents talk about emotions with their young children is critical for understanding emotional socialisation. In this longitudinal research, 18 white, middle-class mothers and their preschool children discussed salient past events when the children were 40, 58, and 70 months of age. Analyses revealed that mothers talked more about emotions and talked about a greater variety of emotions with daughters than with sons. Mothers also focused more on negative emotions with daughters than with sons. Although there were no gender differences between girls and boys at the beginning of the study, by the last phase, girls talked more about emotion and about a greater variety of emotion than did boys and also initiated more emotion-related discussions than did boys. Results are discussed in relation to a growing body of evidence on gender and emotion across the life span.

Preschoolers' perceptions of their mothers' and fathers' reactions to injury-risk behavior

Seventy-eight 3 year-old children participated in structured interviews. Boys reported wanting to engage in higher levels of risk than did girls. Children viewed mothers as allowing boys and girls to engage in similar levels of risk. Conversely, they viewed fathers as permitting higher levels of risk by boys than by girls. These findings are discussed in terms of family socialization.

Does the Thought Count? Gratitude Understanding in Elementary School Students

ABSTRACT Gratitude, although studied throughout history by scholars from diverse backgrounds, has been largely understudied in psychology until recently. The psychological literature on gratitude is expanding, but it is still particularly limited with children. The authors compared younger (first- and second-grade students; n = 30) and older (fourth- and fifth-grade students; n = 27) children on gratitude-related ratings surrounding gift giving vignettes that included either a desirable (e.g., a birthday cupcake) or an undesirable (e.g., a melted ice cream cone) gift. Empathy was also measured. Hierarchical regressions revealed different patterns of predictors for desirable and undesirable gifts. For desirable gifts, liking significantly predicted gratitude and liking predicted effort. For undesirable gifts, older children and those who perceived the target as liking the gift more predicted higher gratitude ratings. Finally, higher gratitude rating predicted both higher ratings of giver effort (i.e., intention or how hard did the giver try to give a nice gift) and liking of the undesirable gifts. More research on childrens understanding of gratitude is needed but these results suggest that school-aged children take into account givers’ intentions and thoughts behind gift giving in determining feelings of gratitude. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.

Commentary on "Adolescents in a Changing World: Intracultural Diversity in Developmental Contexts"

Most of what psychologists know about adolescence comes from psychological theories that were developed in the context of the United States and Western Europe. &dquo;In the past, cross-cultural and multicultural issues have rarely received the unifying theoretical attention they deserve in developmental psychology, especially in the study of adolescence,&dquo; states Muus (1996, p. 378) in his book, Theories of Adolescence. Schlegel and Barry’s (1991) book, Adolescence : An Anthropological Inquiry, contributes greatly to a crosscultural understanding of adolescence, yet the book focuses almost entirely on preindustrial and primitive societies rather than on contemporary life. The four articles included in this special issue