New directions for child development
-
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). ⋯ 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).