Research suggests that individuals are racially biased when judging the emotions of others (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002) and particularly regarding attributions about the emotion of anger (Halberstadt, Castro, Chu, Lozada, & Sims, 2018; Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). Systematic, balanced designs are rare, and are comprised of adults viewing adults. The present study expands the questions of racialized emotion recognition accuracy and anger bias to the world of children. Findings that adults demonstrate either less emotion accuracy and/or greater anger bias for Black versus White children could potentially explain some of the large racialized disciplinary discrepancies in schools. To test whether racialized emotion recognition accuracy and anger bias toward children exists, we asked 178 prospective teachers to complete an emotion recognition task comprised of 72 children's facial expressions depicting six emotions and divided equally by race (Black, White) and gender (female, male). We also assessed implicit bias via the child race Implicit Association Test and explicit bias via questionnaire. Multilevel modeling revealed nuanced racialized emotion recognition accuracy with a race by gender interaction, but clear racialized anger bias toward both Black boys and girls. Both Black boys and Black girls were falsely seen as angry more often than White boys and White girls. Higher levels of either implicit or explicit bias did not increase odds of Black children being victim to anger bias, but instead decreased odds that White children would be misperceived as angry. Implications for addressing preexisting biases in teacher preparation programs and by children and parents are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Numerous parental emotion socialization factors have been implicated as direct and indirect contributors to the development of children's emotional competence. To date, however, no study has combined parents' emotion-related beliefs, behaviors, and regulation strategies in one model to assess their cumulative-as well as unique-contributions to children's emotion regulation. We considered the 2 components that have recently been distinguished: emotion regulation and emotional lability. We predicted that mothers' beliefs about the value of and contempt for children's emotions, mothers' supportive and nonsupportive reactions to their children's emotions, as well as mothers' use of cognitive reappraisal and suppression of their own emotions would each contribute unique variance to their children's emotion regulation and lability, as assessed by children's teachers. The study sample consisted of an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse group of 165 mothers and their third-grade children. Different patterns emerged for regulation and lability: Controlling for family income, child gender, and ethnicity, only mothers' lack of suppression as a regulatory strategy predicted greater emotion regulation in children, whereas mothers' valuing of children's emotions, mothers' lack of contempt for children's emotions, mothers' use of cognitive reappraisal to reinterpret events, and mothers' lack of emotional suppression predicted less lability in children. These findings support the divergence of emotion regulation and lability as constructs and indicate that, during middle childhood, children's lability may be substantially and uniquely affected by multiple forms of parental socialization.

Adultification, perceiving a child as older and more mature, and anger bias, perceiving anger where it does not exist, are two phenomena disproportionally imposed on Black children compared to White children. The current study assessed whether perceiving a Black child as older increases the odds of mistakenly perceiving anger. Participating were 152 parents who viewed video representations of 40 children in an emotion understanding paradigm. Black children were not seen as older than White children but they did have 1.27 higher odds of being misperceived as angry (p < .05). Additionally, for each year increase in perceived age, the odds of anger bias increased by 1.04 for the Black children (p < .05), but did not increase for White children. Implications of this finding include Black children receiving increased consequences when adults perceive them as older and angry.

We examined micro developmental processes related to the socialization of children's gratitude by testing whether parents who engage in more frequent daily socialization practices targeting children's gratitude reported more frequent gratitude displays by their children after controlling for potential confounds. 101 parent-child dyads completed a baseline lab visit followed by a seven-day diary study. Using multi-level modeling, we found that parents who engaged in more frequent gratitude socialization acts reported more frequent displays of gratitude by their children across the seven-days (between-dyad effect) and that on days when a parent engaged in more socialization acts than usual parents reported relative increases in gratitude displays by their children (within-dyad effect). These findings show that parent socialization acts are associated with children’s displayed gratitude and point to the need for future work to explore reactive and proactive parent-child interactions that may underlie these associations as well as associations between micro-developmental and macro-developmental processes.