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SUMMARY We assessed associations between family styles of expressing emotion and children's expressive styles and skill in understanding emotion. We used a meta-analytic strategy for synthesizing the studies in these two areas, and we examined moderating variables of emotion valence, age group, and measurement diversity in the relationship between family expressiveness and outcomes in children. For emotional expressiveness, positive family expressiveness and positive children's expressiveness were consistently associated across age, but negative family expressiveness and negative children's expressiveness were linearly and curvilinearly related across age, with a U-shaped relationship. For emotion understanding, positive family expressiveness and children's understanding were not related at any age. Negative and negative-submissive family expressiveness and children's emotion understanding tended to be related across age, both linearly and curvilinearly (an inverted U-shaped relationship). Explanations for these relations and future goals for research are discussed.
Halberstadt et al. (Tue,) studied this question.