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

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.