Browsing by Author "Hernandez, Erika"
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- Grandmothers' and mothers' emotion socialization through intergenerational reminiscing in underrepresented families in the U.S.Hernandez, Erika (Virginia Tech, 2020-05-26)Emotion socialization is defined as how socializers teach children about emotions, and one way socializers do this is through reminiscing about past emotional events. In the current study, I build on prior research on maternal emotion socialization by examining grandmothers' role in socializing children's emotions, given the prominence of grandparents' involvement in caregiving tasks for minority and underrepresented families. I also incorporate indirectness, a concept that is well-established in linguistic research. Rather than focusing on what family members say during emotion-related reminiscing, indirectness assesses how family members communicate reminiscing content. Participants for Study 1 – the Family Interaction Study – were 18 grandmother-mother-child triads (5 Latinx and 13 Appalachian) with children in the 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade. Families discussed two past, shared emotional events together, one positive event and one negative, in both triadic and dyadic interactions. Grandmothers', mothers', and children's speech was coded for use of emotion labels and explanations, using an established coding scheme in the emotion socialization literature, as well as for indirectness, using a coding scheme created in my previous work. Grandmothers and mothers completed questionnaires about children's social outcomes (emotion regulation and social competence), and children self-reported on their own social behavior. Grandmothers and mothers also completed questionnaires about their beliefs about children's emotions, as well as their experiences related to being underrepresented. Finally, grandmothers and mothers responded to an open-ended prompt about their race, ethnicity, and culture in relation to emotion and family values. Descriptive analyses for the Family Interaction Study were conducted to examine similarities and differences between grandmothers' and mothers' speech during familial conversations. Descriptive results indicate that grandmothers and mothers were involved during reminiscing conversations to a similar extent. Given the small sample size for this study, I was not able to conduct the planned within- and across-group tests for associations between grandmothers' and mothers' experiences and beliefs, their emotion-related discourse, and children's social outcomes. Grandmothers' and mothers' responses to the open-ended prompt were analyzed with a thematic analysis. Qualitative results identified themes present in existing literature, such as those regarding emotion expression, emotion regulation, and teaching of emotion, as well as themes not yet identified in the literature, such as the role of religion in the socialization of children's emotions. Participants for Study 2 – the Online Grandmothers Study – were 150 grandmothers (52 African American, 51 Latinx, and 50 Appalachian) with grandchildren in the 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade. Grandmothers completed the same questionnaires as the participants in the Family Interaction Study about grandchildren's social outcomes, as well as their beliefs about children's emotions, and their experiences related to being underrepresented. Quantitative analyses for this study were conducted to investigate associations between grandmothers' social position, beliefs about emotion, and grandchildren's social outcomes. Results for the Online Grandmothers Study indicate links between grandmothers' value of positive emotion and children's lower lability/negativity, lower internalizing behaviors, and lower externalizing behaviors, particularly for African American families. Further, for Appalachian families, results indicate a link between grandmothers' belief in parental guidance of children's emotions and children's lower externalizing behaviors. Thus, results suggest that grandmothers play a unique role in children's socio-emotional development, one that is both similar and different to the mother's. This role may pertinent for development in middle childhood for a few reasons, including grandmothers' influence on children's developing sense of self, promoting children's positive coping as they transition into adolescence, as well as providing salient experiences regarding race/ethnicity that may serve as a basis for racial-ethnic identity (REI) development. Overall, findings highlight the importance of considering intergenerational shared caregiving in minority families and the roles of grandmothers as socializing agents.
- “Lots of Prayer, Lots of Emotional Coaching, and Pray it Works out the Best”: Tuning in to Kids in a Rural Appalachian CommunityHernandez, Erika; Carmichael, Katie; Satterwhite, Emily M.; Yanuaria, Chelsea; Dunsmore, Julie (2020-07)Rural Americans face barriers in access to services such as psychoeducation programs. The purpose of this study was to describe how participants in a rural Appalachian community, a geographic location that has been largely underrepresented in the literature, responded to a psychoeducation program about parents’ facilitation of children’s emotional competence. The Tuning in to Kids (TiK) parent education program focuses on improving parents’ awareness of children’s emotions, their ability to promote children’s developing emotional competence, and the strength of the parent– child bond. This work has shown beneficial effects in Australia, yet research is scarce regarding implementation in the United States, particularly with rural populations. The TiK program was delivered in 2 groups of 6 sessions each, with 2 participants in the first group and 7 participants in the second group. To analyze session transcripts, we employed discourse analysis methods from multiple disciplines, including thematic coding, linguistic analysis, and sociocultural analysis. Overall, our interdisciplinary analysis allowed us to draw conclusions about unique ways that both participants and the facilitator contributed to group success. Key results included the emergence of 4 major themes: participants’ questioning/adopting TiK methods, parental support across participants, facilitator’s leveling the hierarchy, and facilitator self-disclosure. Findings support the utility of an interdisciplinary approach to examining parent education in rural Appalachia, a population that is underrepresented in the literature. Further, our findings support parents’ openness to psychoeducation in this community, as well the effectiveness of the facilitator’s integration of locally-relevant content throughout the program.
- Toward a holistic view of parents' discourse: Indirect communication as an emotion socialization strategyHernandez, Erika (Virginia Tech, 2016-05-10)Parents teach their children about emotions through a process called emotion socialization and one way that they can do so is through shared discussions about emotions. Research in developmental psychology indicates that parental emotion socialization strategies through discourse such as elaboration and labels and explanations are related to children's emotion understanding and social competence. In the current study, I apply the concept of indirect communication, which has been used in linguistics since the 1970s, to parental emotion socialization with preschool-age children (n= 55; 31 females, 24 males). I define indirect communication as parental speech in which the form and function of a subject-verb phrase do not match and examined relations of parental indirect communication to the previously established strategies in developmental psychology of elaboration and use of labels and explanations. To understand whether this type of communication may influence children's development, I also examined relations of indirect communication to preschoolers' emotion understanding and social competence. Results indicate that parental indirect communication during positive events was related to parental explanations during negative events. Parental indirect communication did not significantly predict children's emotion understanding or social competence, but showed a trend for the association between indirect communication during negative event discussions and children's nonstereotypical emotion understanding. However, the direction for this association was opposite than hypothesized. These results do not suggest consistency of indirect communication across positive and negative event discussions as an emotion socialization strategy.