Pedagogy in emotions: Caregivers report expressing daily emotions to young children to teach them about emotions, actions, objects, and norms

This paper examines what caregivers intend to teach young children with their emotion expressions in everyday life. We first review the importance of caregivers' emotion expressions for children's emotion socialization and understanding, as well as their social learning about actions, objects, and norms. Then, we report results from an empirical study that collected approximately 4000 ecological momentary assessments of caregivers' emotions to examine what they intended to teach their young children through their emotion expressions. We found that caregivers expressed emotions with the intent to teach their children about actions, objects, and norms more often than about emotions. Findings also suggest that discrete emotion expressions were linked with different teaching intentions: sadness increased the likelihood of intent to teach about emotions and moral norms, anger increased the likelihood of intent to teach about actions, disgust increased the likelihood of intent to teach about objects, pragmatic norms, and conventional norms, and fear increased the likelihood of intent to teach about objects and prudential norms. Together, these findings have implications for research on children's emotional development and social learning.