Understanding Emotion in the Family: Children's and Parents' Attributions of Happiness, Sadness, and Anger

COVELL, KATHERINE, and ABRAMOVITCH, RONA. Understanding Emotion in the Family: Children's and Parents' Attributions of Happiness, Sadness, and Anger. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1987, 58, 985-991. This study is an investigation of children's and parents' attributions of children's and mothers' happiness, sadness, and anger. 123 children ages 5 to 15 years answered questions on causal attributions of their own and their mothers' emotions, method of inference, and change of maternal emotion. 54 parents were asked reciprocal questions. Major findings were age differences in causal attribution of maternal emotion, age increases in use of behavioral rather than expressive cues for inferring emotion, and a majority of children believing themselves able to alter maternal emotion. Unlike previous findings, only 5and 6-year-old children attributed maternal anger to themselves only. Older children did not causally attribute maternal anger to themselves only; however, across ages children cited themselves as a cause of maternal anger and causally attributed their own anger, rather than their happiness or sadness, to their family.