Parent and Peer Emotion Responsivity Styles: An Extension of Gottman's Emotion Socialization Parenting Typologies

Abstract

This theoretical paper introduces six emotion socialization typologies that can be used for designating emotion responsivity styles of parents and peers of children in middle childhood, referred to as Parent and Peer Emotion Responsivity Styles (PPERS). This typology draws on theoretical foundations of meta-emotion and emotion socialization. These typologies are compliment with and extend Gottman's emotion-based parenting styles, as they are organized generally by whether the response is more positive or more negative and whether the response is more emotionally constructive or destructive, but extend the four styles to include whether the parent or peer targets the emotion directly when responding to a child's emotions, or whether they target the emotion-related behavior. On the positive end, there is the Emotion Constructive style, which targets the child's emotions directly. The other two positive styles include Emotion Responsive and Emotion Acceptive, which target the child's emotional behaviors with higher or lower levels of activity. On the negative side, there is the Emotion Destructive style which is employed to target the emotion itself, while the Emotion Punitive and Emotion Dismissive styles target the child's emotion-related behavior with varying levels of activity. Implications for the development and study of these theoretical typologies are discussed.

Keywords: emotion; emotion responsivity styles; emotion socialization; parents; peers.

Figure 1

Parent and Peer Emotion Responsivity Styles. The central responsivity styles of Emotion Constructive (positive) and Emotion Destructive (negative) are employed to target emotions directly, while the outer styles target emotion-related behavior with varying levels of activity, with Emotion Responsive (positive) and Emotion Punitive (negative) featuring higher activity, and Emotion Acceptive (positive) and Emotion Dismissive (negative) utilizing less parental/peer activity.