Emotion language use provides insight into a person's emotional landscape. However, little is known about how preschool aged children and their parents use emotion language in their real world interactions. To address the shortcomings of the current body of empirical work on naturally occurring emotion language, this dissertation asks the following four research questions: 1) How do children and parents use emotion words in their daily lives?; 2) How is children's emotion language related to parents' emotion language?; 3) How is emotion language use related to emotional functioning?; and 4) How does emotion language in a lab setting compare to a natural setting? This dissertation implements a naturalistic methodology tool to answer the above questions. Thirty-five preschool aged children and their parents were recruited to participate in a two-wave longitudinal study in which the children wore a digital recording device for one day at each of the time points to capture acoustic information about the emotion language and behaviors they and their parents use in their daily lives. Additionally, participants completed a traditional laboratory based paradigm used to study emotion language within families. Parents also completed self-report measures related to emotion functioning for themselves and their child. Results indicate that children and their parents use high rates of positive emotion but very low rates of negative emotion in their naturally occurring interactions. This is different from lab based paradigms that elicit high rates of both positive and negative emotion language from children and parents. Next, children's use of emotion words tends to match the emotion language of their mothers more than their fathers but gender of the child also plays an important role. Very little support emerged for the emotion regulation model, as evidenced by children who cry and whine the most and who have the most behavioral problems tending to use negative emotions the most. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that emotion language reflects emotional state rather than regulates it. And, finally, the ecological validity of laboratory studies of emotion word usage is called into question by the independence of emotion language elicited in the lab and the natural expression of emotion words in a natural setting. Implications for researchers conducting work in the area of emotion language and emotional development are discussed. / text

Family therapists have proposed that specific types of family interactions are dysfunctional for the family system and can produce long-term negative effects for the child. They further propose that, for healthy family functioning to be maintained, parental alliances must be sustained and excessive cross-generational coalitions (parent-child alliances) must be blocked. This fundamental assumption, proposed by family therapists, has rarely been empirically tested. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between family interactional patterns and the misconduct of adolescent males. Misconduct by the adolescent was defined by the youth having contact with the police due to delinquent behavior. Specifically, this study was concerned with determining if cross-generational coalitions, witnessed in parent-child interactions, were predictive of later antisocial behavior on the part of the adolescent while controlling for family structure, family problem solving, marital satisfaction, parental conflict, and child externality. Subjects were 68 families consisting of mother, father or stepfather, and son. The first family interaction assessment took place in 1984-1985 when the child was 9.7 years old. The second assessment of family interaction occurred two years later. Follow-up data on the adolescent's delinquent behavior, assessed through county court records, was last collected in 1991 when subjects were 15 to 16 years old. Families were paid for their participation as part of their involvement in a larger study (Capaldi & Patterson, 1987). The results of logistic and multiple regression analyses indicated no association between parent-child coalitions and occurrence or the severity of delinquent behavior. Both analyses did, however, find that family problem-solving skills and a non-intact family structure were significant predictors of later delinquency and of the severity of the delinquency by the adolescent. / Graduation date: 1993