Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 Jul 20;13(1):11767.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-38502-1.

Parental socialization of guilt and shame in early childhood

Milica Nikolić  1 , Eddie Brummelman  2 , Bram Orobio de Castro  2 , Terrence D Jorgensen  2 , Cristina Colonnesi  2
Affiliations

Parental socialization of guilt and shame in early childhood

Milica Nikolić et al. Sci Rep. .

Erratum in

Abstract

Self-conscious emotions emerge early in human development and they help children navigate social relationships. Little is known about the socialization of self-conscious emotions in early childhood. We theorized that parental mental state language use and warmth would be important for young children's self-conscious emotions and their consequent prosocial behaviors. Ninety-eight children residing in the Netherlands (52% girls) aged 2-5 (M = 48.66 months, SD = 13.50 months) visited the research lab with one parent. First, we observed parental mental state language and warmth. Afterward, children were led to believe that they caused a mishap (i.e., accidentally breaking the experimenter's favorite toy) to evoke their guilt and shame, which we micro-coded. In subsequent tasks, we observed children's helping behaviors toward the experimenter. We found that the combination of frequent parental mental state language and high warmth was associated with children's quicker helping to the previously harmed experimenter across toddlerhood and early childhood. More guilt was related to more helping whereas more shame-like avoidance was related to less helping. Our findings based on the sample of Dutch parents and children suggest that, parental frequent mental state talk, in combination with high warmth, may promote children's ability to repair social relationships and behave prosocially after mishaps.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(a) Hypothesized model for the whole sample controlling for age. Bold lines represent significant effects. (b) Hypothesized model for two age groups. Bold lines represent effects that are significant for both age groups. Dashed lines represent effects that differ for two age groups (the sign of the left shows the direction of the effect for toddlers (2–3 years old) and the sign on the right shows the direction of the effect for older children (4–5 years old).
Figure 2
Figure 2
The association between parental mental state language and children’s helping for different levels of parental warmth. Both predictors were mean centered. High and low warmth were visualized using 1 unit above/below the mean. Parental mental state language values are displayed as proportions.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Setting of the tasks: (a) Picture-book reading task. (b) Puzzle task. (c) Broken toy mishap task. (d) Helping task.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Drummond JD, Hammond SI, Satlof-Bedrick E, Waugh WE, Brownell CA. Helping the one you hurt: Toddlers’ rudimentary guilt, shame, and prosocial behavior after harming another. Child Dev. 2017;88(4):1382–1397. doi: 10.1111/cdev.126532. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Lewis M, Sullivan MW. The development of self-conscious emotions. In: Elliott AJ, Dweck CS, editors. Handbook of Competence and Motivation. Guilford Press; 2005. pp. 185–201.
    1. Eisenberg N, Cumberland A, Spinrad TL. Parental socialization of emotion. Psychol. Inq. 1998;9(4):241–273. doi: 10.1207/s15327965pli0904_1. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Zahn-Waxler C. Socialization of emotion: Who influences whom and how? New Direct. Child Adolesc. Dev. 2010;128:101–109. doi: 10.1002/cd.271. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Keltner D, Buswell BN. Embarrassment: Its distinct form and appeasement functions. Psychol. Bull. 1997;122(3):250–270. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.122.3.250. - DOI - PubMed

Publication types