Patterns of Association between Early Childhood Teachers' Emotion Socialization Styles, Emotion Beliefs and Mind-Mindedness

ABSTRACT

Research findings: This study advances our understanding of early childhood teachers’ emotion socialization styles by innovatively exploring how these relate to teachers’ beliefs about emotions and levels of mind-mindedness, while controlling for age, level of education, teaching experience, and training in emotion education. Sixty female teachers (Mean age = 40.24 years; SD = 11.65 years) took part in the study. They completed two self-report questionnaires assessing their beliefs about emotion and their use of emotion-coaching versus emotion-dismissing socialization styles, respectively. We evaluated their mind-mindedness via a mind-minded description task. There were significant associations among the investigated variables. We also tested the hypothesis that a linear discriminant function including lower beliefs in instructing and modeling emotions, higher beliefs in protecting children from negative emotions, and lower level of MM predicted teachers’ membership in the high emotion-dismissing group. Practice or policy: Our findings suggest the need for including in teachers’ preservice education and continuing professional development more attention to teachers’ awareness of their ideas about and representation of children’s inner world, with a view to fostering an educational approach to emotion that relies more on an emotion-coaching style and less on an emotion-dismissing one.

Author contribution statement

Veronica Ornaghi made a substantial contribution to designing the research, interpreting and discussing the data, and writing the paper. Alessia Agliati made a key contribution to designing the research, coding the data, and writing the paper. Alessandro Pepe was responsible for the statistical analyses. Piera Gabola made a valuable contribution to the discussion of the findings in light of her expertise in teacher education and professional development.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all the teachers who took part in the study and to the directors of the participating early-childhood education centers for their enthusiastic cooperation. We thank Anna Di Massa, Cristina Ghelfi, Nicole Moller, and Valentina Vergata for their valuable assistance with collecting and coding the data. Finally, special thanks to Clare O’Sullivan for her proof-reading of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics Approval

This research was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Milano-Bicocca.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a grant from the University of Milano-Bicocca (ATE-0116, 2016) awarded to the first Author.