The purpose of this study was to examine the relation of mothers attitude toward childrens expressiveness and childrens emotional regulation to peer competence.
The subjects were 206 children in 5 to 6 years of age and their mothers. For assessing c...
The purpose of this study was to examine the relation of mothers attitude toward childrens expressiveness and childrens emotional regulation to peer competence.
The subjects were 206 children in 5 to 6 years of age and their mothers. For assessing childrens peer competence, children responded to Peer Rating Scale(Asher, Singleton, Tinskey, & Hymel, 1979), and were rated by teachers by means of Peer Competence Scale(Park & Rhee, 2001).
To assess mothers attitude toward childrens expressiveness, I used Parent Attitude toward Childrens Expressiveness Scale(Saarni, 1990).
For assessment of emotional regulation, I used the sub-scales for self regulation and others regulation out of the 4 sub-scales of Emotional Intelligence Scales(Lee, 1997) which was based on the reserch by Salovey(1990), Mayer(1996), Goleman(1995), and Saami(1990).
The collected data were analyzed by SPSS. For data analysis, descriptive statistics and Pearsons correlation coefficients were calculated. To find out the subjects general characteristics, frequency and percentage were calculated. To understand the relations among mothers attitude toward childrens expressiveness and childrens emotional regulation to peer competence, I estimated partial correlation coefficients after controling childrens ages, sexes, and the number of brothers and sisters. And also to find out the explanation power of mothers attitude toward childrens expressiveness and childrens emotional regulation to peer competence, I performed hierarchical regression analysis.
The results of this study were as follows:
First, the more affectionate and permissive mothers attitude toward childrens expressiveness was, and the better children regulate their emotion, the more competent they are in the peer relations.
Secondly, the more affectionate and permissive mothers attitude toward childrens expressiveness was, the more competent they were especially in prosocial aspects of peer relations.
Thirdly, the more effectively children regulate selfs and others emotion, the more competent they were in the peer relations. To put it concretely, the more social, prosocial, and leading they were, the better they were likely to be accepted in the peer groups.