Family emotional expressiveness as the basis of emotional education in the family

Abstract

The paper discusses the problem of family emotional expressiveness and its importance for emotional education in the family. Emotional expressiveness is explained as the way family members express positive and negative emotions in their interaction with children, more precisely as the general tendency of parents to express emotions in the family. The aim of this paper is to determine the emotional expressiveness of families and to look at the differences in relation to socio-demographic characteristics (gender of the child, family structure, parents' educational and employment status). The research subjects were parents of children aged 7-11 years. The FEQ family expressiveness scale (Halberstadt, 1986) was used as an instrument in the research. The general findings of the study confirm that positive-submissive emotions are most often expressed in families, followed by positive-dominant ones, while negative emotions are expressed rarely to occasionally. The obtained data indicate that positive-submissive emotions are more often expressed in single-parent families and families with employed mothers. The presented results indicate the importance of family expressiveness for emotional education in the family because children learn how to express their emotions by imitating their parents.