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Journal of Family Psychology1996, Vol. 10, No. 3, 243-268

Copyright 1996 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.O893-32O0/9OT3.OO

Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy and the Emotional Lifeof Families: Theoretical Models and Preliminary Data

John M. Gottman, Lynn Fainsilber Katz, and Carole HoovenUniversity of Washington

This article introduces the concepts of parental meta-emotion, which refers to parents'emotions about their own and their children's emotions, and meta-emotion philosophy,which refers to an organized set of thoughts and metaphors, a philosophy, and anapproach to one's own emotions and to one's children's emotions. In the context of alongitudinal study beginning when the children were 5 years old and ending when theywere 8 years old, a theoretical model and path analytic models are presented that relateparental meta-emotion philosophy to parenting, to child regulatory physiology, toemotion regulation abilities in the child, and to child outcomes in middle childhood.

The importance of parenting practices forchildren's long-term psychological adjustmenthas been a central tenet in developmental andfamily psychology. In this article, we introducea new concept of parenting that we call parentalmeta-emotion philosophy, which refers to anorganized set of feelings and thoughts aboutone's own emotions and one's children's emo-tions. We use the term meta-emotion broadly toencompass both feelings and thoughts aboutemotion, rather than in the more narrow senseof one's feelings about feelings (e.g., feelingguilty about being angry). The notion we havein mind parallels metacognition, which refers tothe executive functions of cognition (Allen &Armour, 1993; Bvinelli, 1993; Flavell, 1979;Fodor, 1992; Olson & Astington, 1993). In ananalogous manner, meta-emotion philosophy

John M. Gottman, Lynn Fainsilber Katz, and Car-ole Hooven, Department of Psychology, Universityof Washington.

The research of this article was supported by Na-tional Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) ResearchGrants MH42484 and MH35997, by an NIMH MeritAward to extend research in time, and by ResearchScientist Award K2MH00257.

This research received a great deal of support fromMichael Guralnick, director of the Center for HumanDevelopmental Disabilities (CHDD), and CHDD'score facilities, particularly the Instrument Develop-ment Laboratory at the University of Washington.

Correspondence concerning this article should beaddressed to John M. Gottman, Department of Psy-chology, Box 351525, University of Washington,Seattle, Washington 98115.

refers to executive functions of emotion. In thisarticle, we discuss the evolution of the meta-emotion construct and describe its relationshipto various aspects of family and child function-ing. We present a parsimonious theoreticalmodel of the role of parental meta-emotions inchildren's emotional development, operational-ize this model, and present some path analytictests of the model. In this model, we argue (a)that parental meta-emotion philosophy is re-lated to both the inhibition of parental negativeaffect and the facilitation of positive parenting;(b) that it directly affects children's regulatoryphysiology; and (c) that this, in turn, affectschildren's ability to regulate their emotions—hence, parental meta-emotion philosophy has animpact on a variety of child outcomes.

Background

The Concept of Meta-Emotion

Research in developmental psychology on theeffects of parenting has focused on parentalaffect and discipline, selecting variables such aswarmth, control, authoritarian or authoritativestyles, and responsiveness (see Ainsworth, Bell,& Stayton, 1971; Baumrind, 1967, 1971;Becker, 1964; Cohn, Cowan, Cowan, & Pear-son, 1992; C. P. Cowan & P. A. Cowan, 1992;Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Patterson, 1982; andSchaefer, 1959). Little attention has been placedon examining the parents' feelings and cogni-tions about their own affect or their feelings andcognitions about their child's affect.

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Our review of popular parenting guides alsorevealed that the overwhelming majority ofthese parenting guides are based on obtainingand maintaining child discipline. However, onegenre of parenting guides focuses on children'semotions and on how to make immediate andeveryday emotional connections with a childthat are not critical and contemptuous, but ac-cepting. These kinds of parenting guides can betraced to the seminal influence of one childpsychologist: Haim Ginott (Ginott, 1956, 1971,1975). Although many psychological systemsof thought (e.g., attachment theory, psychoanal-ysis) have written about the importance of thechild's affect, Redl (1966) and Ginott both em-phasized intervening with a child's strong neg-ative emotions while the child is having theemotions. They also emphasized intervening di-rectly, dealing with the child's consciousthoughts and actions. This difference was soimportant, in our view, that it amounted to arevolution in "how one deals with children," touse Redl's (1966) words.

Our initial interest was in this concept ofparents' awareness of their children's emotionallives and their attempts to make emotional con-nections with their children. This interest led tothe development of our meta-emotion interview(Katz & Gottman, 1986). All the parents wereseparately interviewed about their own experi-ence of sadness and anger, their philosophyof emotional expression and control, and theirattitudes and behavior about their children'sanger and sadness. In our pilot work, we dis-covered a great variety in the emotions, experi-ences, philosophies, and attitudes that parentshad about their own emotions and the emotionsof their children. For example, one pair of par-ents said that they viewed anger as "from thedevil," and that they would not permit them-selves or their children to express anger. Someparents were accepting of sadness and anger butdid not engage in problem solving with theirchild. Other parents were not disapproving ofanger but, instead, in laissez-fairre fashion, ig-nored anger in their children. Still other parentsencouraged the expression and exploration ofanger. There was similar variation with respectto sadness. Some parents minimized sadness inthemselves and in their children, saying suchthings as, "I can't afford to be sad," or "Whatdoes a child have to be sad about?" Other par-ents thought that emotions like sadness in theirchildren were opportunities for intimacy, that

sadness was important information that some-thing was missing in one's life.

This area of meta-emotion is probably char-acterized by great variability even in laboratoryexperiments that elicit emotions. Researchershave reported large variability in results fromlaboratory experiments designed to elicit emo-tion, such as the startle response. Ekman,Friesen, and Simons (1985) reported a consis-tent set of responses across participants to beingstartled, but there were huge individual differ-ences in the emotional response to having beenstartled, that is, in people's meta-emotions tothe startle; Levenson and Sutton (personal com-munication, June 15, 1994) reported a similarset of results. Meta-emotion may be a pervasiveand understudied dimension in emotion re-search.

An Emotion-Coaching Meta-EmotionPhilosophy

In our pilot work, we noticed that there aresome parents who are aware of the emotions intheir lives (particularly the negative emotions),who can talk about those emotions in a differ-entiated manner, who are aware of these emo-tions in their children, and who assist theirchildren with their emotions of anger and sad-ness, acting like an emotion coach. This is aparental meta-emotion philosophy we call anemotion-coaching philosophy. We found that anemotion-coaching meta-emotion philosophyhad five components: parents (a) said that theywere aware of low intensity emotions in them-selves and in their children; (b) viewed thechild's negative emotion as an opportunity forintimacy or teaching; (c) validated their child'semotion; (d) assisted the child in verbally label-ing the child's emotions; and (e) problem solvedwith the child, setting behavioral limits, anddiscussing goals and strategies for dealing withthe situation that led to the negative emotion.We hypothesized that these parents have agreater ability than other parents to maneuver inthe world of emotions, that they are more com-fortable with the world of emotions, and thatthey are better able to regulate emotions. Weexpected them to be more affectionate with theirchildren and less autocratic than other parents.However, it was our observation that anemotion-coaching meta-emotion philosophywas different from parental warmth, and we

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tested this notion in the current study. Veryconcerned, generally positive and warm parentscan be oblivious to the world of emotion, and anemotion-coaching meta-emotion philosophy issomething additional that these parents bring totheir roles as parents. Perhaps warmth and limitsetting are correlated with these meta-emotionvariables, but we think that they are not thesame dimensions of parenting.

In contrast, we found that a dismissing meta-emotion philosophy was one in which parentsfelt that the child's sadness or anger were po-tentially harmful to the child, that it was theparents' job to change these toxic negative emo-tions as quickly as possible, that the childneeded to realize that these negative emotionswould not last and were not very important, andthat it was the parent's job to convey to the childa sense that he or she could ride out thesenegative emotions without damage. We foundthat emotion-dismissing families could be sen-sitive to their children's feelings and wanted tobe helpful, but their approach to sadness, forexample, was to ignore or deny it as much aspossible. Often they perceived a child's strongemotion as a demand that they fix everythingand make it better. These parents hoped that thedismissing strategy would make the emotion goaway quickly. They often conveyed a sense thatthe child's emotion was something they mayhave been forced to deal with, but it was notinteresting or worthy of attention in itself. Theydescribed sadness as something to get over, rideout, but look beyond and not dwell on. Theyoften used distractions when their child was sadto move the child along, and they even usedcomfort, but within specified time limits, as ifthey were impatient with the negative emotionitself. They preferred a happy child and oftenfound these negative states in their child quitepainful. They did not present an insightful de-scription of their child's emotional experienceand did not help the child with problem solving.They did not see the emotion as beneficial or asany kind of opportunity, either for intimacy orfor teaching. Many dismissing families sawtheir child's anger (without misbehavior) asenough cause for punishment or a Time Out.

It is important to point out that the termmeta-emotion is being used in its broadestsense. Metacommunication is communicationabout communication, and metacognition iscognition about cognition. Meta-emotion in thenarrow sense might refer to emotions about

emotion; for example, we might only be study-ing how parents feel about getting angry at theirchildren (e.g., feel guilty about getting angry).However, we use the term broadly to encom-pass feelings and thoughts about emotion. Asthe examples just provided suggest, the con-struct being tapped involves parents' feelingsand thoughts about their own and their chil-dren's emotions, their responses to their child'semotions, and their reasoning about these re-sponses (i.e., what the parent is trying to teachthe child when responding to the child's anger).This broader construct indexes a fundamentalattitude or approach to emotion. For some peo-ple, emotions are a welcome and enriching partof their lives; they believe, in a fundamentalway, that it is OK to have feelings. However,for other people, emotions are to be avoided andminimized; the world of negative emotions isseen as dangerous (see Appendix).

Meta-Emotion and Parenting

From a theoretical standpoint, we think ourmeasures of parental meta-emotion philosophyare embedded within a web of measures that tapparent-child interaction. We expect that par-ents' meta-emotion philosophy is not indepen-dent of their parenting. Hence, in our theoreticalmodel, we include meta-emotion variablesalong with parenting variables. It is our viewthat we need to be specific about our descriptionof parenting; for heuristic purposes (within therestricted range of families in our samples), wediscuss three dimensions of parenting behav-iors.

First, we started with everyday, mundanenegativity. Inherent in the literature on parent-ing is the idea that small things in everydayparenting can be quite harmful for children (orserve as indexes of more harmful types of par-enting), akin to what J. Reid has called "natter-ing" (see Patterson, 1982). Ginott (1965) wrotestrongly about this in his discussion of the im-portance of (a) understanding and validating thechild's emotions and (b) avoiding contempt anddisapproval. Thus, in our measurement of thisnegativity in our laboratory-based parent-childinteractions, we included three variables: paren-tal intrusiveness, criticism, and mockery. Wecall this type of parenting derogatory. In ateaching task, as some of the parents in ourlaboratory instructed their children, they mixed


in a blend of frustration, taking over for thechild as soon as the child had trouble with thetask (which we call intrusiveness), using criti-cism and derisive humor (mockery, humiliation,belittlement of the child). We think that thisdimension of parenting represents the microso-cial processes characteristic of parental rejec-tion (e.g., Whitbeck, Hoyt, Simons, & Conger,1992).

Next, we also wished to measure two kinds ofpositive parenting. The first is the kind ofwarmth that Baumrind (1967, 1971) and othersdescribed: We refer to this dimension of posi-tive parenting as warmth. Following C. P.Cowan and P. A. Cowan (1992), we include inthis dimension of warmth co-warmth, whichincludes warmth between parents while inter-acting with the child. Our second dimension ofpositive parenting involves a positive structur-ing, responsive, enthusiastic, engaged, and af-fectionate parenting during the teaching task inour laboratory. This type of positive parentalresponse goes beyond warmth. It includes theresponsive style that attachment theorists haveidentified, but it is more complex than that. Wecall it scaffolding-praising (on the general scaf-folding concept, see Choi, 1993; Kirchner,1991; Pratt, Kerig, Cowan, & Cowan, 1988; andVygotsky, 1987). From watching and codingthe videotapes, we noticed that this is a dimen-sion quite different from Baumrind's authorita-tive parenting. Parents high on the scaffolding-praising dimension provided structure for thetask, stating the goals and procedures of thegame simply, in a relaxed manner, and with lowinformation density; they then waited for theirchild to act and commented primarily when thechild did something right, acting like a cheeringsection at a football game, giving praise andapproval. Parents low on this scaffolding-prais-ing dimension either provided little structure forthe learning situation for their children, or theygave information rapidly, with high density, andenthusiastically, appearing to excite and con-fuse the child; such parents then waited to com-ment until their child had made a mistake.These parents were then usually critical of thechild's performance.

Are the concepts of meta-emotion and emo-tion coaching simply subdimensions of positiveparenting? We think not; we think that they addto current concepts in the parenting literatureand are more general. Emotion coaching is onereason why the parenting advice literature is, in

our view, far richer than the parenting researchliterature. For example, what would we predictthat an authoritative parent would do (or rec-ommend that he or she should do) when his orher child has just had a nightmare? Being warmand structuring provides no real guidelines.Emotion coaching does provide these guide-lines.

What is the expected relationship betweenmeta-emotion and the derogation, warmth, andscaffolding-praising dimensions? When we be-gan this study, we had two working hypotheses.The first hypothesis was that a coaching meta-emotion philosophy might be nested within aweb of positive parenting. We proposed that anemotion-coaching meta-emotion philosophy en-tails parenting that goes a step beyond the ideaof warmth; that is, we suggested that it entailsscaffolding-praising parenting. The second hy-pothesis was that meta-emotion performs itsmajor function by inhibiting parental deroga-tion; in particular, as Ginott (1965) noted, weproposed that understanding and validating thechild's emotions serves to avoid criticism, con-tempt, and disapproval of the child. Most of theexamples from Ginott's books had to do withthe importance of emotion coaching in avoidingescalating negativity, frustration, disapproval,and emotional distance between parents andchildren. It appears to have been first suggestedforemost as a mechanism for obtaining exten-sive relief from spiraling negativity: Perhapsvalidating the child's affect serves as an oppo-nent process to derogation. Hence, it was en-tirely reasonable to hypothesize that the majoreffect of a coaching meta-emotion philosophywould be inhibiting parental negativity and thatit might have no effect on positive parenting.

Meta-Emotion and the Development ofEmotion Regulation Abilities

Precisely how do we think that meta-emotions affect the functioning of families andact to affect child outcomes? What do we pro-pose as the mechanism? We are particularlydrawn to theories that attempt to integrate be-havior and physiology, and our theorizing isoriented toward approaches that have empha-sized the importance of (a) the development ofchildren's abilities in the regulation of emotion(Garber & Dodge, 1991) and (b) the develop-ment of children's abilities to self-soothe strong

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and potentially disruptive emotional states(Dunn, 1977), focus attention, and organizethemselves for coordinated action in the serviceof some goal. We think that these general sets ofabilities underlie the development of other com-petencies. We are especially interested in chil-dren's peer social skills, particularly because oftheir predictive validity (Parker & Asher, 1987).Central peer social competencies include theability to resolve conflict, to find a sustainedcommon ground play activity, to compromise inplay, and to empathize with a peer in distress(e.g., see Asher & Coie, 1990; Gottman, 1983;Gottman & Parker, 1986).

We suggest that fundamental to these abilitiesis the ability to soothe one's self physiologicallyand to focus attention. These abilities underliebeing able to listen to what one's playmate issaying, being able to take another's role andempathize, and being able to engage in socialproblem solving. They involve the child know-ing something about the world of emotion, bothhis or her own and others'. We propose that thisknowledge arises only out of emotional connec-tion being important in the home. In the follow-ing section, we briefly review our reasons formeasuring child physiology as related to theconstruct of emotion regulation.

Regulatory Physiology1

We used Porges' (1984) suggestion that theremay be a physiological basis for the ability toregulate emotion. To explain his notions, wediscuss two concepts related to the child's para-sympathetic nervous system (PNS) physiology.The major nerve of the PNS is called the vagusnerve. The vagus nerve (so called because it isthe vagabond nerve that travels throughout thebody, innervating the viscera) is the X-th cranialnerve. The tonic firing of the vagus nerve slowsdown many physiological processes, such as theheart rate. Research by Porges and his col-leagues on the PNS has indicated a strong as-sociation between high vagal tone and goodattentional abilities, and there is speculation thatthese processes are related to emotion regula-tion abilities. Porges (1992) reviewed evidencethat suggests that a child's baseline vagal tone isrelated to the child's capacity to react to envi-ronmental stimuli. There is a substantial body ofliterature showing that basal vagal tone is re-lated to both greater behavioral reactivity and

greater soothability; it is also related to greaterability to focus attention and greater ability toself-soothe and explore novel stimuli (DiPietro& Porges, 1991; Fox, 1989; Hofheimer & Law-son, 1988; Huffman, Bryan, Pederson, &Porges, 1988; Linnemeyer & Porges, 1986; Por-ter, Porges, & Marshall, 1988; Richards, 1985,1987; Stifter & Fox, 1990; Stifter, Fox, &Porges, 1989).

There is also another dimension of vagal tonethat needs to be considered, namely, the abilityto suppress vagal tone. In general, vagal tone issuppressed during states that require focused orsustained attention, mental effort, attention torelevant information, emotional interaction, andorganized responses to stress. Thus, the child'sability to perform a transitory suppression ofvagal tone in response to environmental (andparticularly emotional) demands is another in-dex that needs to be added to the child regula-tory physiology construct.2 It relates to the like-lihood of approach rather than withdrawal;some infants with a high vagal tone who wereunable to suppress vagal tone in attention-demanding tasks exhibited other regulatory dis-orders (e.g., sleep disorders; Huffman, Bryan,Pederson, & Porges, 1992; Porges, Walter,Korb, & Sprague, 1975). Porges, Doussard-Roosevelt, and Portales (1992) found that9-month-old infants who had lower baselinevagal tone and less vagal tone suppression dur-ing the Bailey examination had the greatestbehavioral problems at 3 years of age, as mea-sured by the Achenbach and Edelbrock (1986)Child Behavior Checklist. Measures of infant

1 We did not include the sympathetic portion of thechild's physiology in our modeling. However, we didfind that the child's concentration of adrenaline in the24-hr urine sample at age 5 correlated (r = 0.39, p <.001) with the child's illness at age 8.

2 We hypothesize that basal vagal tone is related tothe child's ability to sustain attention, whereas theability to suppress vagal tone is related to the child'sability to shift attention when that is called for.Porges and Doussard-Roosevelt (in press) pointedout that one must be cautious about expecting thesuppression of vagal tone to always be the appropri-ate vagal response to external demands. In the neo-natal intensive care unit, the appropriate response togavage feeding turned out to be increases in vagaltone, consistent with the support of digestive pro-cesses (DiPietro & Porges, 1991). Premature infantswho increased vagal tone during gavage feeding hadsignificantly shorter hospitalizations.


temperament derived from maternal reports(Bates, 1980) were not related to the 3-yearoutcome measures.3

The Theoretical Challenge in PredictingPeer Social Competence in MiddleChildhood From Emotion-CoachingInteractions

A major goal of our research was to predictpeer social relations in middle childhood fromvariables descriptive of the family's emotionallife in preschool. It is now well known that theability to interact successfully with peers and toform lasting peer relationships are importantdevelopmental tasks. Children who fail at thesetasks, especially in the making of friends, are atrisk for a number of later problems (Parker &Asher, 1987). The peer context presents newopportunities and formidable challenges to chil-dren. Interacting with peers provides opportuni-ties to learn about more egalitarian relation-ships, to form friendships with agemates, tonegotiate conflicts, to engage in cooperative andcompetitive activities, and to learn appropriatelimits for aggressive impulses. On the otherhand, children are typically less supportive thancaregivers when their peers fail at these tasks. Inour research, we have found that the quality ofthe child's peer relationships forms an impor-tant class of child outcome measures.

We should explain what the theoretical chal-lenge is in predicting peer social relations acrossthese two major developmental periods, frompreschool to middle childhood. Major changesoccur in peer relations in middle childhood.Children become aware of a much wider socialnetwork than the dyad. In preschool, childrenare rarely capable of sustaining play with morethan one other child (e.g., see Corsaro, 1979,1981). However, in middle childhood, childrenbecome aware of peer norms for social accep-tance, and teasing and avoiding embarrassmentsuddenly emerge (see Gottman & Parker,1986). Children become aware of clique struc-tures and of influence patterns as well as socialacceptance. The correlates of peer acceptanceand rejection change dramatically, particularlywith respect to the expression of emotion. Oneof the most interesting changes is that the so-cially competent response to a number of salientsocial situations, such as peer entry and teasing,is to be a good observer who is somewhat wary,

"cool," and emotionally unflappable (see Gott-man & Parker, 1986). It is well known that theworst thing a middle-childhood child can dowhen entering a group of peers is to start talkingabout his or her own feelings as parents andchildren do in an emotion-coaching interaction.Thus, the basic elements and skills a childlearns through emotion coaching (labeling, ex-pressing one's feelings, talking about one'sfeelings, and drawing attention to one's self)become liabilities in the peer social world inmiddle childhood. Therefore, the basic modellinking emotion coaching in preschool to peerrelations in middle childhood cannot be a sim-ple isomorphic transfer of social skills model.Instead, it becomes necessary to identify amechanism that makes it possible for the childto learn something in the preschool period thatunderlies the development of appropriate socialskills across this major developmental shift inwhat constitutes social competence with peers,the development in the child of what Salovey &Mayer (1990) and Goleman (1995) called"emotional intelligence," a kind of "socialmoxie." A number of researchers are addressingconcepts related to this idea of the child's de-veloping social intelligence, such as the child'sdeveloping ability to cope with stress (Saarni,1993), the child's emotional competence (Den-ham, Renwick, & Hewes, 1994), the child'sdeveloping empathy (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1990;Eisenberg & Strayer, 1987), the child's devel-oping social understanding (Denham, Zoller, &Couchoud, 1994; Dunn & Brown, 1994), thechild's developing social and emotional compe-tence and regulation as well as the child's de-veloping theory of social mind (Casey & Fuller,1994; Fox, 1994; Harris & Kavanaugh, 1993;Thompson, 1991), and the child's ability torecognize emotional expressions (Cassidy,Parke, & Butkovsky, 1992; Walden, 1988).

3 Time 1 and Time 2 down regulation scales cor-related 0.41, p = .003. The Time 1 down regulationscale was unrelated to awareness and coaching, but itcorrelated .31 (p = .020) with derogation, .44 (p =.004) with Time 2 child negative affect, and 0.59(p < .001) with Time 2 teacher ratings of negativepeer relations. It was unrelated to scaffolding-praising parenting, to basal vagal tone, or to suppres-sion of vagal tone.

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The Theoretical Model: Hypotheses AboutMeta-Emotion, Parenting, Regulatory

Physiology, and Child Outcomes

In building our theoretical model, we soughtto explain how meta-emotion philosophy mightbe related to a variety of child outcomes. Thetheoretical model is depicted in Figure 1. Giventhe hypothesized effects of parental meta-emotion philosophy on parenting skills, we ex-pected that some effects would occur throughparenting practices. To be specific, we hypoth-esized that the emotion-coaching meta-emotionphilosophy would be related to scaffolding-praising and to the inhibition of parental dero-gation. We also expected meta-emotion philos-ophy, high scaffolding-praising, and lowderogation to be related to superior emotionregulation abilities (as indexed by PNS func-tioning and parental report). We also askedwhether effects between child physiology andemotion coaching were bidirectional andwhether our effects varied with child tempera-ment. One concern with these results waswhether parents were coaching their childrendifferentially as a function of the children'stemperament.

We also proposed that there would be a rela-tionship between the parents' meta-emotioncoaching philosophy and a variety of child out-comes. We hypothesized that a parental meta-emotion coaching philosophy would be relatedto the child's developing social competencewith other children. We expected that thechild's peer social competence would hold inthe inhibition of negative affect (Guralnick,

1981), particularly negativity such as aggres-sion, whining, oppositional behavior, fightingrequiring parental intervention, sadness, andanxiety with peers. We also expected that anemotion-coaching meta-emotion philosophywould predict the development of superior cog-nitive skills of the child (through superior vagaltone and greater ability to focus attention). Wepredicted that the relationship between the par-ents' meta-emotion philosophy and the child'sachievement at age 8 years would hold over andabove preschool measures of intelligence. Thus,we predicted that two preschool children ofequal intelligence would differ, in part, in theirultimate achievement in school as a function ofthe parents' meta-emotion philosophy. Finally,we examined the child's physical health as anoutcome variable. Because the vagus innervatesthe thymus gland (Bulloch & Moore, 1981;Bulloch & Pomerantz, 1984; Magni, Bruschi, &Kasti, 1987; Nance, Hopkins, & Bieger, 1987),a central part of the immune system that isinvolved in the production of T-cells, we alsoexpected that basal vagal tone would be relatedto better child physical health. The path modelsalso tested direct effects of meta-emotion,which are theoretically unexplained by themodel.

We recognize that our correlational studiescould not provide us with a causal understand-ing of the theoretical pathways we proposed.However, we expected the correlational data toyield results consistent with or disconfirmingthese causal models, thereby suggesting somedirections for future research.

Direct Pathway

Child Outcomes

A

Child EmotionRegulation Abilities

Figure I. Summary model for how parental meta-emotion might influence child outcomes.


Method

An abbreviated set of procedures is presented inthis article in the interests of conserving space. SeeGottman and Katz (1989) and Katz and Gottman(1993) for more detail.

Participants

Fifty-six normal families were recruited from theChampaign-Urbana, Illinois, community for thisstudy; 24 of the families had a male and 32 a female4- to 5-year-old child. We used a telephone version ofthe Locke-Wallace marital satisfaction scale(Krokoff, 1984) to ensure that our study includedcouples with wide range of marital satisfaction levels.The mean marital satisfaction score was 111.1 (SD =29.6). Three years later, we recontacted 53 of the 56families (94.6% of the original sample).

Procedure

The procedure involved laboratory sessions andhome interviews for both parents and children. Weused a combination of naturalistic interaction, highlystructured tasks, and semistructured interviews.Home and laboratory visits consisted of two homevisits-one with the marital couple and one with thechild—and three laboratory visits—one with the cou-ple only, one with the couple and their 4 to 5-year-oldchild, and one with the child alone. Families wereseen at Time 1, when children were 4-5 years old,and again three years later at Time 2, when childrenwere on average 8 years old.

Time 1

Assessment

Meta-emotion interview. All parents were sepa-rately interviewed about their own experience of sad-ness and anger; their philosophy of emotional expres-sion and control; and their feelings, attitudes, andbehavior about their children's anger and sadness(Katz & Gottman, 1986). Their behavior during thisinterview was audiotaped. A script for this semistruc-tured interview is available from John M. Gottman orLynn Fainsilber Katz.

Parent- child interaction. The parent- child inter-action session consisted of a modification of twoprocedures used by P. A. Cowan and C. P. Cowan(1987). In the first task, parents were asked to obtaininformation from their child. The parents were in-formed that the child had heard a story, and they wereasked to find out what the story was. The story thatthe children heard did not follow normal story gram-mar and was read in a monotone voice; thus, the story

was only mildly interesting for the children and hardto recall. The second task involved teaching the childhow to play an Atari game that the parents hadlearned to play while the child was hearing the story.The interaction lasted 10 min.

Children's film viewing. During a second visit tothe laboratory, children were shown segments ofemotion-eliciting films. Our main interest was toobtain indexes of physiological activity during emo-tional and nonemotional events. Each film clip waspreceded by a neutral story and an emotion inductionfilm clip of an actress who acted out the emotions ofthe protagonist in the upcoming story. The functionof the emotion induction was to direct the child toidentify with the protagonist and experience the spe-cific emotion in question. Although each film clipwas designed to elicit a specific emotion, the emotionelicitation was not very successful; instead, we ob-tained a range of facial expressions of emotion duringin each film. Hence, we refer to the films by theirtitles instead of by the emotion they were intended toinduce. The child viewed clips from six films: (a) Flyfishing; (b) Wizard ofOz (Leroy & Flemming, 1939),flying monkey scene; (c) Charlotte's Web (Barbara,Nicolas, & Takamoto, 1973), Charlotte dies; (d)Meaning of Life (Goldstone & Gilliam, 1983), res-taurant scene; (e) Wizard of Oz, taking Toto away;and (f) Daisy (Alcroft & Mitton, 1984).

Child's physiological functioning. We assessedthe following physiological variables from the childunder baseline conditions, during parent-child inter-action, and during film-viewing:

1. Cardiac interbeat interval (IBI). This measurewas determined by measuring the time interval be-tween successive spikes (R-waves) of the electrocar-diogram (EKG).

2. Pulse transmission time to the finger (PTT-F).This was a measure of the elapsed time between theR-wave of the EKG and the arrival of the pulse waveat the finger.

3. Finger pulse amplitude (FPA). This was anestimate of the relative volume of blood reaching thefinger on each heart beat.

4. Skin conductance level (SCL). This measurewas sensitive to changes in levels of sweat in theeccrine sweat glands located in the hand.

5. General somatic activity (ACT). To measuresomatic activity, the participant's chair was mountedon a platform that was coupled to a rigid base in sucha way as to allow an imperceptible amount of flexing.

Child intelligence. The Wechsler PreschoolScales of Intelligence (WPPSI; Wechsler, 1974)Block Design, Picture Completion, and Informationsubscales were administered to each child.

Measure and Coding

Meta-emotion coding system. The audiotapes ofthe meta-emotion interview were coded using a spe-

META-EMOTION 251

cific checklist rating system that codes for parents'awareness of their own anger and sadness, their ownregulation of anger and sadness, and their acceptanceand assistance (coaching) with their child's anger andsadness (Hooven, 1994). For each dimension, thecoding manual was quite detailed and specific. TheAwareness score was a sum of 12 subscales: experi-encing the emotion; being able to distinguish theemotion from others; having various experienceswith the emotion; being descriptive of the experienceof the emotion; being descriptive of the physicalsensations connected with this emotion; being de-scriptive of the cognitive processes connected withthis emotion; providing a descriptive anecdote;knowing the causes of the emotion; being aware ofremediation processes; answering questions about theemotion easily, without hesitation or confusion; talk-ing at length about this emotion; and showing interestor excitement about this emotion. Coaching was asum of 11 scales: showing respect for the child'sexperience of the emotion, talking about the situationand the emotion when the child is upset, interveningin situations that give rise to the emotion, comfortingthe child, teaching the child rules for appropriateexpression of the emotion, educating the child aboutthe nature of this emotion, teaching the child strate-gies to soothe the child's own emotion, being in-volved in the child's experience of the emotion, feel-ing confident about how to deal with this emotion,having given thought and energy to the emotion andwhat one wants the child to know about this emotion(goals), and using strategies that are age and situationappropriate. Because coders used rating scales, theappropriate statistics to use for computing interraterreliability were correlations between independent ob-servers for each scale, rather than Cohen's kappa,which is appropriate for categorical data. The rangeof interobserver reliabilities for the awareness andcoaching scales was 0.73 to 0.86.

Observational coding of parent-child interaction.Parenting was coded using the Cowans' Observa-tional System, the Kahen Engagement Coding Sys-tem (KECS), and the Kahen Affect Coding Systems(KACS; Gottman, in press). The KECS consists ofseven parental engagement codes, including threepositive, three negative, and one neutral code. Thethree Kahen positive engagement codes are as fol-lows: (a) Engaged, which consisted of parental atten-tion toward the child; (b) Positive Directiveness, inwhich parents issued a directive statement that beganin a positive way (e.g., "move to your right"); and (c)Responds to Child's Needs, in which parents re-sponded to a child's question or complaint. The threenegative engagement codes are as follows: (a) Dis-engaged, in which parents were not attending to thechild; (b) Negative Directiveness, in which parentsissued a directive statement that began in a negativeway (e.g., "Don't move around so much"); and (c)

Intrusiveness, which involved physical interferencewith the child's actions (e.g., grabbing the joy stick).

The KACS also consists of seven parental affectcodes. The three positive affect codes are as follows:(a) Affection, which consisted of praise and physicalaffection; (b) Enthusiasm, which was coded as prais-ing and excitement at the child's performance; and(c) Humor, which involved parental laughter or jok-ing. The three negative affect codes are as follows:(a) Criticism, which involved direct disparagingcomments or put-downs of the child's behavior orperformance; (b) Anger, in which parents were visi-bly frustrated by the child's actions or demonstrateddisappointment, annoyance, or irritation toward thechild; (c) Derisive Humor, in which parents usedhumor at the child's expense (e.g., through sarcasmor by making fun of the child).

Parent-child interaction was coded continuously inreal time with coding synchronized to the originalparent-child interaction. The total number of timeseach variable occurred in the 10-min parent-childinteraction session was recorded and totals acrosstime were calculated for each of the 14 parent-childinteraction variables. This index was therefore anestimate of the frequency of the parenting behaviorwithin a 10-min period. Independent observers codedmothers and fathers. Engagement and affect dimen-sions were also coded by independent observers.Reliability was calculated across coders using a cor-relation coefficient. Because total number of secondswithin each parent code was the variable computedand used in all data analyses, the appropriate reliabil-ity statistic was a correlation coefficient, rather thanCohen's kappa or percentage agreement. For theKECS, the mean correlation was .96, with a range of.86 to .99; for the KACS, the mean correlation was.93, with a range of .84 to .97. We computed the sumof derisive humor, intrusiveness, and criticism forboth parents to form our derogation variable. TheKahen systems were also used to measure thescaffolding-praising dimension, which consisted ofparental affection, engagement, positive structuring,responsiveness, and enthusiasm; we computed thesum of these variables across parents. Although it iscertainly reasonable to expect to find differentialeffects of mothers and fathers on children and wehave evidence that maternal and paternal parentingwere uncorrelated (the correlation between motherand father derogation was .21 and was .12 betweenmother and father scaffolding-praising), we summedacross parents* scores for the sake of economy. Thescaffolding-praising dimension differs from Baum-rind's authoritative parenting in that it includes aresponsive and enthusiastic parenting style; in theteaching task, this was reflected in parents' (a) effec-tively structuring and scaffolding the child's learningand (b) generally waiting until the child did some-thing right and men praising enthusiastically, rather


than waiting until the child made a mistake and thenbeing critical.

The parents' behavior during the parent-child in-teraction was also coded using P. A. Cowan and C. P.Cowan's (1987) coding system. This coding systemcodes parents behavior on dimensions of warmth-coldness, presence or lack of structure and limit set-ting, whether or not parents back down when theirchild is noncompliant, anger and displeasure, unre-sponsiveness or responsiveness, and whether or notparents make maturity demands of their child. Thebehavior of parents toward each other during theirinteractions with their child (their coparenting) wasalso coded on dimensions of warmth, cooperation orcompetition, anger, disagreement, responsiveness,pleasure in coparenting, clarity of communication,and amount of interaction. For the purposes of thisstudy, only the warmth dimension (parenting andcoparenting) was of interest. For the parenting di-mension, coders rated the overall degree of warmthand the highest level of warmth and coldness exhib-ited by each parent. For the coparenting dimension,coders rated the overall degree of warmth and thehighest level of warmth and coldness exhibited by thecouple toward each other. Warmth was defined as thesum of all the warmth variables minus the sum of allthe coldness variables. Interreliability for the warmthvariable was .64.

Child regulatory physiology. An estimate of thechild's baseline vagal tone was taken when the childwas listening to the introduction to an interestingstory taken from an animated cartoon film (clip fromCharlotte's Web), a variable we called basal vagal.The child's ability to withdraw vagal tone was esti-mated as a difference between this estimate of basalvagal tone and the child's vagal tone during an ex-citing film clip designed to elicit strong emotion (thescene from The Wizard of Oz when the flying mon-keys kidnap Dorothy). We expected vagal tone to bewithdrawn and heart rate to increase when the childwas emotionally engaged with the fearful stimuli inthis second film clip. We called this second variabledelta vagal. This second variable indexed the child'sability to suppress vagal tone when engaging with astrong emotional stimulus that included an environ-mental demand for changing attentional focus or reg-ulating emotion. In this case, the engagement withthe environment involved the demands for an emo-tional response being elicited by the emotional filmas well as the demands to focus attention on the Atarivideogame the child played immediately after eachfilm clip. The index of vagal tone was computed asthe amount of variance in the cardiac interbeat inter-val spectrum that was within the child's respiratoryrange using spectral time-series analysis. This indexof vagal tone measures respiratory sinus arrhythmia,a measure of PNS tonus, which has been found toindex attentional processes and emotion regulationabilities (Porges, 1984). Mean levels of interbeat

interval at baseline, interbeat interval variability (ameasure of vagal tone; Izard, Porges, Simons, &Haynes, 1991), reactivity of heart rate variabilityfrom baseline to the mean of the parent-child inter-action (used as an index of the child's ability tomodulate vagal tone by DiPietro, Porges, & Uhly,1992), and mean skin conductance level during base-line (first visit to the lab) were also computed asindexes of the amount of the child's chronic physio-logical arousal and PNS functioning.

Time 2

Assessment

Overview. Time 2 assessment consisted ofteacher ratings of child outcomes and couple's re-ports of considerations of marital dissolution. Fami-lies were recontacted 3 years later for follow-upassessments of child and marital outcomes. Childrenwere, on average, 8 years old (M = 96.9 months;range = 82-110 months). Ninety-five percent (53 outof 56) of the families in the initial sample and 86%(48 out of 56) of the children's teachers at follow-upagreed to participate in the Time 2 assessments.

Ratings of children's behavior problems.Teachers completed the Child Adaptive BehaviorInventory (CABI; P. A. Cowan & C. P. Cowan,1990). We used the CABI as a measure of childoutcomes for two reasons. First, the CABI was de-veloped on a normal sample and contains subscalesthat are less pathological in nature than the ChildBehavior Checklist (Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1986).Second, the CABI also controls for teacher ratingbias by having teachers complete the scale on allsame-sexed children in the classroom and deriving zscores for the target child. The CABI has good inter-nal consistency (average alpha = .81; range = .66 to.90) and predictive validity (P. A. Cowan & Cowan,1990). The factors and subscales that comprise theCABI include the following: (a) the Antisocial Fac-tor, which consists of the Hyperactivity, AntisocialBehavior, Negative Engagement with Peers, Hostil-ity, Fairness-Responsibility (keyed negatively),Calm Response to Challenge (keyed negatively), andKindness-Empathy (keyed negatively) subscales;and (b) the Internalizing Factor, which consists of theIntroversion, Depression, Victim-Rejected, Tension,and Extroversion (keyed negatively) subscales.

Differential Emotions Scale. We used the Differ-ential Emotions Scale (Izard, 1982) as a measure oftemperament, given Goldsmith and Campos' (1982)definition of temperament in terms of affect expres-sion (for a review and critique, see Bates, 1987). TheDifferential Emotions Scale is a 36-item question-naire that mothers complete with regard to the fre-quency with which they have observed their childrendisplay specific emotions in the past week. Each item

META-EMOTION 253

is rated on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (rarely ornever) to 5 (very often). We computed the totalnumber of emotions and the total number of positiveand negative emotions for the week.

Teacher ratings of peer aggression. Teachersalso completed the Dodge Peer Aggression Scale(Dodge, 1986). The Dodge Peer Aggression scaleconsists of items that measure the degree to which thechild uses overt aggression with peers.

Child academic achievement. Children were in-dividually administered the Peabody IndividualAchievement Test—Revised (PIAT-R) as a measureof academic achievement (e.g., see Costenbader &Adams, 1991). They were administered the mathe-matics, reading recognition, reading comprehension,and general information tests.

Emotion regulation questionnaire. Mothers filledout a newly developed 45-item questionnaire aboutthe degree to which their child requires externalregulation of emotion (Katz & Gottman, 1986). Thisquestionnaire includes items that reflect instanceswhen the parent needs to down regulate the child toreduce the child's level of activity, inappropriatebehavior, and misconduct. The alpha coefficient forthe scale was .74.

Child physical health. Child illness was assessedby parental report using a version of the Rand Cor-poration Health Insurance Study measures (availablefrom John M. Gottman or Lynn Fainsilber Katz; seeGottman & Katz, 1989). The following Likert ortrue-false items were summed: "In general, wouldyou say that this child's health is excellent, good, fairor poor?," "The child's health is excellent," "Thechild seems to resist illness very well," "When some-thing is going around this child usually catches it,""This child has had a nosebleed in the past 30 days"(alpha = 0.82).

Results

We begin by discussing the selection andvalidity of variables used for building the theo-retical model. The reduced set of variables usedto index meta-emotion philosophy are pre-sented, and we address the construct validity ofthe derogatory parenting and scaffolding-praising variables by indicating that derogatoryparenting is not anger and that scaffolding-praising parenting is not warmth. We thenpresent the results of our path-analytic model-ing, looking separately at models related to pa-rental derogation and to parental scaffolding-praising. We also test the temperamenthypothesis to see whether parents select theirparenting style to be consistent with the child'sbehavior. Finally, we review the result thatmeta-emotion predicts child academic achieve-

ment at Time 2, even controlling for Time 1child intelligence.

Selection and Validity of KeyTheoretical Variables

Reduced Set of Meta-Emotion Variables

In the interest of parsimony, we needed to cutdown the choice of variables for the modeling,and it was thus necessary to limit the number ofmeta-emotion variables. We started with 12variables (awareness of own emotion, aware-ness of the child's emotion, and coaching, forfather and mother and for sadness and anger).Two variables from this set of 12 were con-structed, one of which was the sum of parentalawareness of the parents' own emotions and thesum of the parents' awareness of the child'semotions and the other of which was the sum ofthe parental coaching of the child's emotions.Table 1 gives a summary of the correlations ofthese two summary meta-emotion variables(i.e., awareness and coaching) with the original12 meta-emotion variables that were obtained.Therefore, it is a presentation of item-total cor-relations that demonstrate the internal constructvalidity of the summary codes. These correla-tions show that the two variables we constructedare related to all the individual awareness andcoaching variables.

Table 1Correlations of the Two Summary Meta-Emotion Variables With Original 12 Variables

Original meta-emotion variables

Father sadnessAwareness ownAwareness childCoaching

Father angerAwareness ownAwareness childCoaching

Mother sadnessAwareness ownAwareness childCoaching

Mother angerAwareness ownAwareness childCoaching

*p<.05. **p<.0\

Awareness

.80***

.68***

.26*

.75***

.69***44***

.56***

.66***

.48***

.57***

.64***

.37**. ***p<

Coaching

.55***

.37**

.63***

.33**49***j 4 * * *

.32**

.63***

.72***

.29*

.36**

.66***.001.


Validity of Child Regulatory Physiology

To examine the validity of the vagal tonevariables, we correlated baseline vagal tone andsuppression of vagal tone with other indexes ofautonomic arousal relating to parasympatheticactivation and general nervous system arousal.As Table 2 shows, baseline vagal tone andsuppression of vagal tone were related to thechild's mean heart rate during the parent-childinteraction, to the child's lower resting heart rateduring the first visit to the laboratory when it wasa mildly stressful and novel situation, to lowerbaseline skin conductance during the secondvisit to the laboratory after initial adaptation, tohigher heart rate variability, and to lower heart ratereactivity in the parent-child interaction.

Validity of Parenting Variables

Derogatory parenting is not anger. In de-velopmental psychology today, there is a gen-eral equation of anger and negativity (see Cum-mings & Davies, 1994), which we considerunfortunate. When the construct of negative af-fect is broken into specific negative emotions,there is evidence that specific negative emotionsserve different functions. In marital interaction,

Table 2Validity of the Two Child PhysiologyVariables Selected for Model Building

Variable

Mean heart rateduring parent-childinteraction

Mean heart rateduring firsttime in thelaboratory

Heart ratereactivity inparent-childinteraction

Heart ratevariability

Skin conductancelevel afteradaptation tolaboratory

Base vagal

- .26*

- .28*

-.24*

.25*

-.37**

Delta vagal

-.40**

- .33**

-.30*

.39**

- .22Note. Basal vagal = child's baseline vagal tone;delta vagal = child's vagal tone when emotionallyengaged.* p < .05. ** p < .01.

anger is not predictive of marital dissolution,whereas contempt is (Gottman, 1993, 1994;Gottman & Krokoff, 1989; Gottman & Leven-son, 1992). Ginott (1965) distinguished angerversus emotional interactions with the child thatcommunicated contempt for the child, globalversus specific criticism, and criticism versusblaming or communications suggesting that thechild was incompetent. He suggested that thelatter communications are harmful to a child,whereas anger is not and may even be healthy.To deal with a tendency to overgeneralize andconclude that anger is harmful for children, weselected the parental derogation codes from theKahen Coding Systems, which were designed tomeasure Ginott's cluster of negative parenting;derogation is not the same as anger parentsexpress toward children. We tested this specif-ically by looking at the relationships betweenparental anger and derogation. Parental angerwas uncorrelated with our measure of parentalderogation (for father anger, r = —.11; formother anger, r = — .06), uncorrelated with themeta-emotion codes, and uncorrelated with neg-ative child outcomes.

Scaffolding-praising is not warmth. It isimportant to emphasize that scaffolding-praising is not merely a dimension of globalpositivity, such as is tapped by the Cowan pa-rental warmth variable. Correlations computedbetween the warmth codes from the Cowansystem and the scaffolding-praising code indi-cated that only maternal warmth was related toour scaffolding-praising variable (r = .32, p <.05). Paternal warmth, maternal and paternalcoldness, and co-warmth all showed no relationto scaffolding-praising.

Summary of the Seven Dimensions of theTheoretical Model

Aside from the outcome variables, there areseven dimensions of the theoretical model. Thetwo meta-emotion variables were derived fromthe meta-emotion coding system used to codethe meta-emotion interview: coaching (a sum of11 scales) and awareness (a sum of 12 sub-scales). The two parenting dimensions were ex-tracted from the Kahen observational scales,scaffolding-praising (sum of three scales of theKECS—engagement, positive directiveness,and responsiveness to the child's needs—andtwo scales of positive affect of the KACS—

META-EMOTION 255

affection-praise and enthusiasm) and deroga-tion (the intrusiveness code of negative engage-ment on the KECS and criticism and derisivehumor of the KACS negative affect codes). Theregulatory physiology dimensions were basalvagal tone (when the child was listening to theintroduction to an interesting story taken froman animated cartoon film, Charlotte's Web) andthe child's ability to suppress vagal tone, whichwas estimated as a difference between this es-timate of basal vagal tone and the child's vagaltone during an exciting film clip designed toelicit strong emotion (the scene from the Wizardof Oz when the flying monkeys kidnap Dor-othy). The emotion regulation dimension wastaken from a questionnaire mothers completed(when the child was 8 years old) about thedegree to which their child required externaldown regulation of emotion.

Building the Theoretical Model

The basic template for the theoretical modelis presented in Figure 2. There are eight con-ceptual pathways consistent with our theoreticalformulation and a direct pathway from meta-emotion to child outcome. First, we predictedthat there would be statistically significant pathcoefficients from the meta-emotion variables tothe parenting variable (Path 1). This was a va-lidity test to see if the variables derived fromour interview related to actual parenting behav-ior. Second, we tested the significance of thepaths from meta-emotion and parenting to thephysiological variables (Paths 2 and 3). Wehypothesized that meta-emotion, operating (inpart) through parenting, would significantly af-

fect these physiological variables. That is, wefundamentally believed that these physiologicalvariables are not entirely engraved in stone,even if they are biological; rather, we believedthat these variables are malleable and shaped inpart by parents through their emotional interac-tions with the child. These conceptual pathwaysenable us to assess whether meta-emotion phi-losophy and parenting in some way are relatedto the child's regulatory physiology, or, con-versely, if the child's regulatory physiology isrelated to meta-emotion philosophy or parent-ing. We also predicted that there would be sta-tistically significant path coefficients connect-ing the child physiology variables to the childoutcome variables (Path 4), suggesting that thechild physiology at age 5 years predicts childoutcome at age 8 years (Path 7). We also pre-dicted the physiological variables would predictthe emotion regulation variable, and that theregulation and the parenting variables wouldrelate to child outcome (Paths 5 and 8). Wepredicted that parenting would have a directeffect on child regulation (Path 6). There maybe direct effects between the meta-emotion vari-ables and the child outcome variables, but, to theextent that this is true, we have not completelysucceeded in our theory, because we will not havehad a mechanism to explain these effects.

In the interest of data reduction, we createdthe following four child outcome variables:

1. Child achievement was the sum of themathematics and reading comprehensionscores.

2. Child's emotion regulation abilities wasassessed with the Down-Regulation scale of theKatz-Gottman Emotional Regulation Question-

Delta Vagal

Physiology

Basal Vagal

Child Outcomes

Regulation

Figure 2. Outline of the general expected path structure of the theoretical model.


naire, assessed when the children were 8 yearsold (called down regulation). Because this istechnically an outcome variable and not a pro-cess variable (because it was measured whenthe children were 8 years old), the emotionregulation variable appears in every child out-come model.

3. Child's peer relations was the sum of threeteacher rating scales: the CABI Negative Peerscale, the CABI Antisocial Scale, and theDodge Peer Aggression scale.

4. Child illness was our health measure atage 8.

We built two sets of theoretical models.Given the hypotheses that meta-emotion philos-ophy might either be related to the inhibition ofparental derogation or the facilitation ofscaffolding-praising parenting, we constructedseparate models to examine hypotheses relatedto derogation and scaffolding-praising. Allmodeling computations were performed usingBentler's (1992) computer program, EQS.

Modeling With Derogatory Parenting

The results of our model building are pre-sented in Figures 3, 4, and 5. The following areour goodness-of-fit statistics: for the academicachievement outcome variable, ^(14, N =56) = 13.68, p = .474, Bentler-Bonett normedfit index (BBN) = .981; for the peer relationsoutcome variable, ^ ( 1 3 , N = 56) = 17.95,/? =.159, BBN = .986; for child illness, ^(12, N =56) = 13.04, p = .366, BBN = .987. Hence, allmodels fit the data. Multiple Rs for the outcomevariables varied: for child academic achieve-ment, R = 0.41; for negative peer teacher rat-

ings, R = 0.62; for child physical illness, R =0.60. The figures present the path coefficients,with z scores for each coefficient in parentheses.As can be seen from these figures, the modelbuilding using our theory was generally suc-cessful. We were able to find linkages for themajor pathways we proposed between meta-emotion and parenting, between meta-emotionand the physiological variables, between parent-ing and the physiological variables for childpeer relations, between physiology and emotionregulation, between emotion regulation andchild outcome, and between parenting and childoutcome. For child illness, we suggested thatbasal vagal tone should relate to less physicalillness, and it turned out that the significantpaths to child illness were parental emotioncoaching and basal vagal tone.

In all models, either awareness or coaching ofthe child's emotions was negatively related tothe negative parenting variable, supporting thehypothesis that awareness or coaching is aninhibitor of parental derogation of the child. Itwas interesting that in all models the child'sability to suppress vagal tone at age 5 was asignificant predictor of the child's emotion reg-ulation at age 8. The greater the child's abilityto suppress vagal tone at age 5, the less theparents had to down regulate the child's nega-tive affects, inappropriate behavior, and overex-citement at age 8.

Modeling With Scaffolding-PraisingParenting

We tested whether the same equations we hadused for negative parenting would fit when the

, Awareness

.73 (6.89)

Figure 3. Path model for child academic achievement with parental derogation. Numbers inparentheses are z scores.

META-EMOTION 257

(Awareness)

.73 (6.68) ( Derogation

-.47 (-3.72)

.45 (3.65)

-.47 (-3.65)

.48 (4.20)

Child PeerRelations

A.31 (2.48)

> ( Down Reguate )

v .61 (5.53)

Figure 4. Path model for child peer relations (teacher ratings) with parental derogation. Numbersin parentheses are z scores.

parental derogation variable was replaced with thescaffolding-praising parenting variable. We ex-pected that some of the path coefficients wouldchange, but we first tested whether or not a similarmodel would fit the data. For the academicachievement outcome variable, a very similarmodel fit the data, ^(14, AT = 56) = 13.12,p = .517, BBN = .986; for the peer relationsoutcome variable, ^(15, N = 56) = 24.14,p = .063, BBN = .978; for child illness, ^(15,N = 56) = 18.82, p = .222, BBN = .981. Theseresults are presented as Figures 6, 7, and 8.

Was scaffolding-praising related to the vari-ables of the model? For child academic achieve-ment, the scaffolding-praising variable was sig-nificantly related to the outcome and to

coaching. For teacher ratings of peer interac-tion, the scaffolding-praising variable was notdirectly related to the outcome, but it was sig-nificantly related to coaching. For child illness,the scaffolding-praising variable was unrelatedto the outcome, but it was significantly relatedto awareness.

Direction of Effects Between EmotionCoaching and Child RegulatoryPhysiology: Testing the TemperamentHypothesis

Although our path models present data sup-porting the notion that emotion coaching can

-.43 (-3.17)

Figure 5. Path model for child illness with parental derogation. Numbers in parentheses are zscores.


Figure 6. Path model for child academic achievement with positive parenting in the model.Numbers in parentheses are z scores. SCAF-PR = scaffolding-praising.

affect a child's vagal tone, it is possible that thedirection of effects may be reversed. That is, itis quite possible that either (a) child physiologyis a part of child temperament, and parents mayselect parenting style to be consistent with in-dividual differences in child behavior or (b)emotion coaching changes a child's vagal tone.Perhaps parents are more likely to do emotioncoaching with a child higher in vagal tone, orperhaps emotion coaching can affect a child'sbasal vagal tone. Although we could not answercausal questions in our path modeling, we didconduct additional analyses to see if resultseither were consistent with or disconfirmed thetemperament hypothesis.

We tested the hypothesis that child vagal tonemight affect emotion coaching by reversing thearrow between these two variables. The modelsfit just as well with the direction of effects

reversed. First, we considered the models withderogatory parenting. For the child outcome ofnegative peer relations, ;^(13, N = 56) =19.32, p = .113, BBN = .985, and the pathcoefficient from basal vagal tone to emotioncoaching was .37, z = 3.62. For the child out-come of child achievement, )^(14, N = 56) =11.28, p = .664, BBN = .989, and the pathcoefficient from basal vagal tone to emotioncoaching was .35, z = 3.74. For the child out-come of child illness, ^(12, N = 56) = 13.36,p = .344, BBN = .986, and the path coefficientfrom basal vagal tone to emotion coaching was.33, z = 3.05. Next, we considered the modelswith scaffolding-praising. For the child out-come of academic achievement, ;^(14, N =56) = 12.77, p = .545, BBN = .986, and thepath coefficient from basal vagal tone to emo-tion coaching was .34, z = 3.35. For the child

42 (-3.35)Delta Vagal ) > ( Down Reguate

Figure 7. Path model for child peer relations (teacher ratings) with positive parenting in themodel. Numbers in parentheses are z scores. SCAF-PR = scaffolding-praising.

META-EMOTION 259

A

.02 (.13)

-.53 H.02)

Child Illness

.43(3.18)

"A

Figure 8. Path model for child illness with positive parenting in the model. Numbers in paren-theses are z scores. SCAF-PR = scaffolding-praising.

outcome of negative peer relations, ^ (15 , N =56) = 19.82, /> = .179, BBN = .982, and thepath coefficient from basal vagal tone to emo-tion coaching was .40, z = 3.69. For the childoutcome of child illness, ^ (14 , N = 56) =19.77, p = .138, BBN = .982, and the pathcoefficient from basal vagal tone to emotioncoaching was .37, z = 3.64. Thus, our modelingcan rule out neither a direction for effects, northe possibility that the effects are bidirectional.

Given recent theorizing that vagal tone is atemperament dimension (Porges, Doussard-Roosevelt, Portales, & Suers, 1994), one con-cern with these results concerns the direction ofeffects; the question is whether parents arecoaching their children differentially as a func-tion of the children's temperament. To furthertest this hypothesis, we correlated coachingwith our temperament measures from the Dif-ferential Emotions Scale. Coaching was uncor-related with the amount of child negative affect(r = .02, ns), the amount of child positive affect(r = .20, ns), and the amount of child totalaffect (r = .16, ns). We were also concernedthat the direct effects of coaching on child out-comes might be qualified as a function of thechild's basal vagal tone. Coaching was signifi-cantly directly correlated with only one of thethree outcomes, the child's Time 2 physicalillness (r = - .55 , p < .001). The child's basalvagal tone was also significantly correlated withthis outcome (r = .30, p < .05); however, thepartial correlation between coaching and thechild's physical illness, controlling basal vagaltone, remained significant (r = - .56, p <

.001). Hence, it appears that the direct benefitsof coaching are unaffected by the child's basalvagal tone.

Meta-Emotion Predicts Child AcademicAchievement at Time 2, Controlling forTime 1 Child Intelligence

If, as we hypothesized, the meta-emotionvariables affect school achievement throughemotion regulation, we should expect that therelationships between the meta-emotion vari-ables and the child's achievement at age 8 willhold, even controlling the child's Time 1 IQ (atage 5). To test this hypothesis, we performed aregression analysis forcing in the three IQ scales(WPPSI Block Design, Picture Completion, andInformation Scale scores) before entering themother's awareness of her own sadness in pre-dicting the child's math scores and, in a secondanalysis, before entering the father's coachingof the child's anger. The F tests for change werecomputed as well as the partial correlations. Forthe prediction of the child's mathematics scoresfrom the mother's awareness of her own sad-ness, F(4, 48) = 6.12, p < .05 (partial correla-tion = 0.34). For the prediction of the child'sreading comprehension scores from the father'scoaching of the child's anger, F(4, 44) = 9.41,p < .01 (partial correlation = 0.37). For theprediction of the child's total achievement scorefrom both the mother's awareness of her ownsadness and the father's coaching of the child'sanger, the two variables were summed for the


analysis, F(4, 45) = 4.13, p < .05 (partialcorrelation = 0.29).

Summary

Let us summarize the results of our modelingin Figure 9 with respect to the eight conceptualpaths numbered in Figure 2. We recognize thatour models are probably not independent of oneanother.

Conceptual Paths

Path 1: Meta-emotion and parenting. Meta-emotion was related to both the inhibition ofparental derogation of the child and to the fa-cilitation of scaffolding-praising parenting.

Path 2: Meta-emotion and child physiology.For models including the derogation parentingvariable, coaching was directly and signifi-cantly related in all the models (achievement,ratings of child peer relations, and child health)to the child's physiology. This linkage wasalso evident in the models that included thescaffolding-praising parenting variable for theachievement and peer relations models (margin-ally for the child health model, z = 1.80). Thissuggests the intriguing hypothesis that perhapsparents can influence a child's physiology byemotion coaching; however, we cannot differ-entiate directionality of effects without an ex-periment. As we posited, the child's physiologywas significantly related to parental emotionregulation ratings, which, in turn, were relatedto child outcomes in the models for derogatoryparenting and scaffolding-praising and the

child's negative child peer relations. There weredirect links between child physiology and childoutcome only for child illness. We note, inpassing, that in path analysis, a path coefficientis a partial correlation; thus, for example, thepathway between delta vagal and down regulatepartials out basal vagal tone. For this reason, wespeak of these pathways in terms of the regula-tory physiology variables instead of in terms ofsingle variables.

Path 3: Parenting and child physiology.This hypothesized pathway was not supportedby any of the models.

Path 4: Parenting and emotional down reg-ulation. This pathway was not supported byany of the models.

Path 5: Parenting and child outcome. Thispathway was supported in three of the six mod-els: for derogatory parenting, there was a directlink with child academic achievement and childpeer relations, whereas for scaffolding-praisingparenting, there was a direct link only withacademic achievement.

Path 6: Child physiology and child outcome.This linkage was supported only for child ill-ness and only in the derogation model.

Path 7: Child physiology and later emotionaldown regulation. This pathway, which wasfrom the 5-year-old suppression of vagal tonevariable to the 8-year-old emotional down reg-ulation variable, was supported in all of themodels.

Path 8: Emotional down regulation and childoutcome. This linkage was supported in two ofthe six models, for models predicting peer rela-tions.

Delta Vagal"— -

Physiology

,-

Basal Vagal

Figure 9. Revision of the path model derived from our theory.

META-EMOTION 261

Unexpected Direct Pathway

In two models for derogatory parenting(teacher ratings of peer relations and child ill-ness) and in one model for scaffolding-praising(child illness), there was a direct pathway fromeither awareness or coaching of the child's emo-tions and the child outcome. For one of thesemodels (derogatory parenting: child peer rela-tions), more awareness predicted more negativeratings, opposite to what we might have pre-dicted, whereas for child illness, more coachingof the child's emotions was related to less childillness, which we predicted. One possible ex-planation for the unexpected linkage is that attimes parental awareness of emotion is not sucha good thing for children. Perhaps being attunedto a child's negative emotion fosters its expres-sion, and even teachers pick up on this when thechild is 8 years old and rate it negatively. Aspart of this explanation, perhaps the arrow ofcausation should be reversed, meaning that par-ents have heightened awareness of their child'snegative emotions because the child is highlyexpressive of them. With this possibility inmind, we attempted to fit path models with thearrow reversed for the three models for whichawareness was positively related to a negativechild outcome. The results of these post hocanalyses were as follows. For the derogatoryparenting models, with the child peer relationsoutcome, the new model did not fit the data,^ (13 , N = 56) = 48.60, p < .001. Hence, thishypothesis is not consistent with our data.4 Therevised figure (Figure 9) places the Time 1meta-emotion variables as the exogenous, ordriving, variables in the model, having theirpurported causal effects on parenting, whichpredicts 8-year-old child outcome, and on childphysiology, which has its major effects on out-come through the child's emotion regulationabilities at age 8. These results are consistentwith the theory we proposed.

Discussion

The preliminary results of our investigationof meta-emotion are encouraging. The data sug-gest that meta-emotion is related to parentingbehavior and to child regulatory physiology;that child regulatory physiology at age 5 pre-dicts emotion down regulation ability at age 8;and that parenting, meta-emotion, and the

child's regulatory physiology and behavior arerelated to child outcomes. In general, aside fromtwo direct connections (from awareness to peerrelations and from coaching to child illness),there are two pathways through the models thatpredict child outcomes: one from the meta-emotion variables through child physiology andemotion regulation and one from the meta-emotion variables through parenting.

The pathway from meta-emotion to thechild's regulatory physiology suggests the hy-pothesis that coaching the child's emotions hasa soothing effect on the child that may changesome key aspects of the child's PNS. If thiswere true, then the child's ability to self-soothe,to regulate negative emotion, and to focus at-tention may be a result of temperament and mayalso be affected by the parents' meta-emotionphilosophy. However, the data also support aninterpretation that suggests that parents may be

4 Because the arrow for awareness has coachingcoming into it and, as a variable, a line from aware-ness represents a partial correlation of awareness,controlling for coaching, we wondered if the problemarose because some families are high in awarenessbut do not coach. We split the families who wereabove the median in awareness into two groups:Group 2 included those above the median (N = 18),and Group 1 included those below the median (N =8) in coaching. Thus, Group 1 represented 8 familieshigh in awareness but low in coaching, whereasGroup 2 represented 18 families high in both aware-ness and coaching. Group 1 had children whose playquality at age 5 was significantly lower than Group 2,F(l, 24) = 4.29, p < .05, Group 1 M = 14.13, Group2 M = 16.00. There were also marginal effects at age5 in the observed negative peer interaction with a bestfriend; in noncompliance, F(l, 24) = 3.05, p = .093,Group 1 = 2.75, Group 2 = .83; and in crying, F(l,24) = 3.74, p = .065, Group 1 = .63, Group 2 = .00.Also, when the children were 8 years old, teachersused the Dodge Rating Scale and rated the childrenon three scales of peer relations. The teachers ratedthe children in Group 1 significantly lower in theDodge Social Skills scale, F(l, 25) = 7.51, p < .05,Group 1 = -3.80, Group 2 = -0 .21; higher in theDodge Aggression Scale, F(l, 25) = 4.56, p < .05,Group 1 = -3.29, Group 2 = -0.40; and lower inthe Dodge scale of Overall Peer Relations, F(l,21) = 5.83, p < .05, Group 1 = -2 .21, Group 2 =0.21 than Group 2. These post hoc results support thehypothesis that the negative linkage between aware-ness and negative child outcomes may be attribut-able, in part, to those families who are aware of theirchild's emotion and perhaps are even accepting of it,but who do not emotion coach their children.


selecting emotion coaching as a good strategyof parenting with children who have higher basalvagal tone. However, parents are not differentiallycoaching their children as a function of our mea-sures of their temperaments. The truth probablylies in a combination of these two directions ofinfluence, or perhaps the influence is bidirectional;an experimental test of the effects of training par-ents in emotion coaching on basal vagal tonewould help sort out these alternatives. We havenow developed and pilot tested a parent trainingintervention in emotion coaching.

The social skills that are related to peer socialcompetence in middle childhood are not thesame as the skills that emotion-coaching parentsare building in their children. It has been wellestablished that calling attention to oneself andone's feelings are precisely the opposite of whatsocially competent children do in a variety ofcritical peer situations in middle childhood (fordata on peer entry, see Putallaz & Gottman,1981, and Asher & Gottman, 1981; for data onteasing, see Gottman & Parker, 1986, and Asher& Coie, 1990). They do not express their emo-tions. On the contrary, they act cool and unruf-fled, as if they have had an "emotion-ectomy."The point here is that children whose parentswere emotion coaches at age 5 are acting in away that teachers describe as socially competentat age 8. Hence, they are skillful enough toknow what to do to be competent with peers atage 8, and these social skills are not at all thesame as what they learned from their parents atage 5. Apparently, emotion-coached childrenhave learned to be savvy about peer social sit-uations, and they can do what is called for. Theymay have a heightened sense of awareness oftheir own emotions, a better ability to self-regulate their own upset, and a greater ability toattend to the salient aspects of any challengingpeer situation. This sense of heightened aware-ness may lead them to be more likely to knowwhat is called for and to do it. This interpreta-tion of our results suggests that what childrenlearn from emotion coaching is not at allmodeling-specific social skills. It is far morelikely that what they have acquired are the toolsto learn how to learn in emotionally challengingsituations, even if that calls for inhibiting emo-tional responding.

From a theoretic standpoint, it is interesting toconsider why and how parental coaching wouldaffect the child's regulatory physiology. On thebasis of the seminal work of Davidson and of

Fox (Davidson, 1984; Davidson, Ekman, Saron,Senulis, & Friesen, 1990; Davidson & Fox,1982; Davidson, Schaffer, & Saron, 1985; Dav-idson & Tomarken, 1990; Fox & Davidson,1987, 1988), we can reason that talking aboutnegative emotions while having the emotionsmight entail changing a right frontal-limbic-autonomic experience of emotion into a leftfrontal dominant experience in which the leftfrontal lobe assumes control over the right fron-tal lobe and its limbic and autonomic connec-tions. The positive affects, language, and angerare lateralized in the left frontal lobe, and Dav-idson called these left-lateralized emotions ap-proach emotions. Anger is considered an ap-proach emotion because it generally tends toengage people with the world rather than lead-ing to disengagement and withdrawal. This maybe, in part, the reason that many clinical inter-ventions suggest a healing process in whichdepression changes into anger. The other nega-tive affects, such as fear, disgust, and sadness,are lateralized in the left frontal lobe; Davidsoncalled these withdrawal affects.

We posit that talking about negative with-drawal emotions while having them entails agreater sense of approach rather than with-drawal, a greater sense of control of the nega-tive emotions, and greater parasympathetic con-trol of autonomic reactions. These hypothesessuggest to us a series of studies using concom-itant electroencephalographic (EEG) and auto-nomic measurement while children are eitherexperiencing a negative emotion, being dis-tracted from an emotional response they arehaving (similar to what dismissing parents do),or talking about the emotions while havingthem (similar to what coaching parents do). Theconditions in these experiments would involve asystematic dismantling of the emotion-coachingparents' behaviors; this group would be com-pared to appropriate controls for rival hypothe-ses and to a dismantling of the counterpart ofthe coaching parent, reflecting a meta-emotionphilosophy we call dismissing. These studiesare currently underway in our laboratory, butwe do not hesitate to point out that these hy-potheses are highly speculative.

The results of this first study of meta-emotionare encouraging, but replication and extensionto a more diverse sample of families is clearlyneeded. We are currently conducting a replica-tion and extension study. Our initial sample wasnot racially or ethnically diverse, and it was

META-EMOTION 263

limited to families with two married parents.Subsequent investigation needs to assesswhether these results generalize to various kindsof single-parent families and to blended fami-lies. Replication is also important because of therelatively small sample size of the present studyand its possible effects on structural equationsmodeling (Loehlin, 1992). Naturalistic samplesof parents interacting with their children duringemotional moments are also needed to see howemotion-coaching families actually talk to theirchildren during times of heightened emotion.These samples should be obtained across vari-ous developmental levels of both the childrenand the parents. We also need to assess thestability of parental meta-emotion philosophyover time. Changes to the meta-emotion inter-view are also needed, including an expansion toinclude other emotions (particularly fear, guilt,and shame) and the development of a measureof child meta-emotion philosophy.

The second general pathway through ourmodels was from the meta-emotion variablesthrough parenting. What this adds to the parent-ing literature is that perhaps parents' own basicfeelings and thoughts about their emotions arestrongly related to or underlie the way theyparent. The results of our modeling with longi-tudinal correlational data suggest a series ofexperiments that would further test the model.Each arrow in the model suggests an interven-tion for altering the variable at the head of thearrow by manipulating the variable at the foot ofthe arrow. Thus, parent training in meta-emotion should affect two pathways: It shouldalter both parenting and the child's regulatoryphysiology, and it may also have a direct effecton child outcome. We are now planning toconduct this research.

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META-EMOTION 267

Appendix

Coaching and Awareness Variables

We created two variables from our coding of themeta-emotion interview: coaching and awareness. Togive readers a qualitative sense of the emotionalnature of these two variables, we present a few ex-amples of quotes from parents who were high andlow on these two variables. Parents high on coachingsaid things like the following: "I feel close to mychild when he is sad," "When Jason is sad it makesme feel like a real Dad, now my heart just goes out tohim," "When my child is sad I let her know that Iunderstand," "When Markie is sad I want to knowwhat he is thinking," "It makes me want to hold himclose," "I feel affectionate," "I feel love even whenhe's upset and angry at me."

Some examples of emotion metaphors and con-cepts parents expressed were as follows: "Angergives me energy and drive," " I think that sadness canbe good and even productive," "Sadness tells you toslow down," "When I am sad I know something ismissing from my life," "Anger is just like clearingyour throat, just clear it and go on," "In my view,attending to sadness is cleansing," "I want her to besad like in movies. It means she can feel and empa-thize," "I often have the good cry, and I think shedoes that too," "Getting angry can be a relief, like astorm that finally happens."

Parents low on coaching included parents whowere either disapproving of the child's emotion ordismissing of the child's emotion. Examples of com-ments they made include the following: "Seeing mychild sad makes me uncomfortable," "I think thatsadness is OK as long as it's under control," "Achild's anger deserves a time out," "I get annoyedwhen my child acts sad," "Children often act sad justto get their own way," "She looks cute and silly whenshe's angry, like a little midget," "I warn him aboutnot developing a bad character," "Her shouting scaresme," "Molly gets into these black moods."

One example of an emotion metaphor expressedby a parent low on coaching was as follows: "Whenpeople get angry they are just relieving themselves onothers." Other disapproving examples had to do withloss of control; humiliation in public; metaphors offire, pressure, heat, and other explosion and violencemetaphors for anger; and generally defeat, hopeless-ness, and pathology concerns about sadness.

For the awareness variable, we found that onlypeople who are aware of emotion and can differen-tially talk about nuances of emotion and emotionintensity find emotional expression to be acceptable.If the low awareness reaction to negative emotionswere to be characterized as a specific emotion pairedto anger and sadness, it would be fear. People low in

awareness and coaching saw these emotions as toxicand dangerous.

People high in awareness tended to believe thatone should not stifle one's emotions; that it was good,healthy, and positive to pay attention to emotion; andthat emotions are always there, a part of life, and it isbest to be aware of them. They said things like it isbest to get anger or sadness "out of your system" bybecoming aware of it and then being able to deal withit. They believed that it was important to recognizesmaller and less intense expressions of emotion toprevent them from escalating. They could speak in adifferentiated manner about each emotion and thebodily sensations of each; for example, some parentstalked about the "delicious" aspects of sadness insome romantic movies but the awful grief that ac-companies an important loss. These parents oftendescribed the physical sensations that accompaniedan emotion, for example, "Sometimes I get so madthat my stomach is in knots."

People low in awareness said that these negativeeffects of anger and sadness were often so aversivefor them that they tended to prefer to minimize theirimportance or not to notice them at all so theywouldn't have to deal with them. That is what wetapped with this variable and is probably the essenceof being low on the awareness variable. For example,one parent said, "When he gets on my nerves likethat, I just tune him out," and, "He's not sad much. Ithurts me to see him sad though. I have to go out fora run." Many parents who expressed discomfort withtheir child's negative affect tended to view it as toxicand believed that it was their role to get the child outof the negative mood as quickly as possible. Many ofthese parents also said that they and their childrenrarely showed the emotion, or (to prove that theycould survive the negative mood) that they can "rollwith the punches." They seemed to be at a loss whenasked to describe how they could tell when they ortheir children had the emotion, and they seemedunaware of what might make a child feel sad or angryand what might be done about it. They often ex-pressed the philosophy that the way to cope withnegativity is to emphasize the positive aspects of lifeand to substitute a positive emotion for the negativeemotion. They said that negative emotion must sim-ply be endured; that the passage of time alone willsolve emotional problems; that to get over a negativeemotion one should just get on with life's routines,ignore the emotion and just go on; that anger orsadness meant loss of control; that feelings are pri-vate, not public; and that it is embarrassing to be sador angry and better not to be aware of it. These

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Appendix (continued)

parents were often most aware of the demand com- and sadness, even if their names, awareness andponent of a child's emotion (that they fix the world coaching, do not sound very emotional,and make it perfect so that their child will not havethis awful emotion). Received January 22, 1995

To summarize, these two variables represent Revision received December 14, 1995highly emotional reactions and metaphors to anger Accepted December 15, 1995 •

New Editors Appointed, 1998-2003

The Publications and Communications Board of the American Psychological Associationannounces the appointment of five new editors for 6-year terms beginning in 1998.

As of January 1,1997, manuscripts should be directed as follows:

• For the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,submit manuscripts to Mark E. Bouton, PhD, Department of Psychology,University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405-0134.

• For the Journal of Family Psychology, submit manuscripts to Ross D. Parke,PhD, Department of Psychology and Center for Family Studies-075,1419Life Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0426.

• For the Personality Processes and Individual Differences section of theJournal of Personality and Social Psychology, submit manuscripts to EdDiener, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 EastDaniel, Champaign, IL 61820.

• For Psychological Assessment, submit manuscripts to Stephen N. Haynes,PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii, 2430 Campus Road,Honolulu, HI 96822.

• For Psychology and Aging, submit manuscripts to Leah L. Light, PhD, PitzerCollege, 1050 North Mills Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711-6110.

Manuscript submission patterns make the precise date of completion of the 1997 volumesuncertain. Current editors, Stewart H. Hulse, PhD; Ronald F. Levant, EdD; Russell G.Geen, PhD; James N. Butcher, PhD; and Timothy A. Salthouse, PhD, respectively, willreceive and consider manuscripts until December 31, 1996. Should 1997 volumes becompleted before that date, manuscripts will be redirected to the new editors for consider-ation in 1998 volumes.

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