A Meta-Analysis of Family Expressiveness and Children's Emotion Expressiveness and Understanding

TLDR

The study examined how family emotion‑expressive styles relate to children's emotion expressiveness and understanding. A meta‑analysis of relevant studies was conducted, evaluating moderators such as emotion valence, age, and measurement diversity. Positive family expressiveness consistently predicted positive child expressiveness across ages, while negative family expressiveness showed both linear and curvilinear (U‑shaped) associations with child expressiveness; for emotion understanding, positive family expressiveness was unrelated to child understanding, whereas negative family expressiveness was linked to child understanding in both linear and inverted‑U patterns. The paper discusses explanations for these relations and outlines future research directions.

Abstract

SUMMARY We assessed associations between family styles of expressing emotion and children's expressive styles and skill in understanding emotion. We used a meta-analytic strategy for synthesizing the studies in these two areas, and we examined moderating variables of emotion valence, age group, and measurement diversity in the relationship between family expressiveness and outcomes in children. For emotional expressiveness, positive family expressiveness and positive children's expressiveness were consistently associated across age, but negative family expressiveness and negative children's expressiveness were linearly and curvilinearly related across age, with a U-shaped relationship. For emotion understanding, positive family expressiveness and children's understanding were not related at any age. Negative and negative-submissive family expressiveness and children's emotion understanding tended to be related across age, both linearly and curvilinearly (an inverted U-shaped relationship). Explanations for these relations and future goals for research are discussed.