This study aimed to develop a measure of early childhood practitioners' beliefs about emotions and to use this measure to examine the structure and correlates of these beliefs. A 40-item emotion beliefs measure was administered to 279 American practitioners. Internal consistency for each of 10 emotion belief areas was weak to moderate. In revising the measure, emotion belief areas with the lowest internal consistency were deleted and items were added to the 6 remaining areas to strengthen their reliability. The resulting 23-item revised measure had internal consistencies of .41 to .62 for each of 6 emotion belief areas. Participants' emotion beliefs were related to their level of education and background in early childhood education. A 4-factor solution provided the best fit to the data, explaining 40% of the variance in the U.S. teachers' emotion beliefs. This factor structure was similar to that of the conceptually derived belief scales. Cultural patterns were examined by comparing beliefs of Korean and American teachers of 4–6-year-olds, using t-tests and factor analyses. Although the structure of emotion beliefs was similar, differences appeared in the level of agreement with many items, reflecting culturally specific expectations a b u t young children's emotional vulnerability and about the nature of emotional bonds and emotion socialization in early childhood programs.
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Hyson et al. (1996) studied this question.