Meta-emotions

Meta-emotion is "an organized and structured set of emotions and cognitions about the emotions, both one's own emotions and the emotions of others". This broad definition of meta-emotion sparked psychologists' interest in the topic, particularly regarding parental meta-emotion philosophy.

Meta-emotion refers to the idea that whenever we elicit a certain emotion, we also deal with subsequent emotions regarding how we experienced the primary emotion. While some psychologists have examined the influence of meta-emotions on how individuals interpret and deal with their own and others' emotions, much of the literature regarding meta-emotion has focused on how parental meta-emotion impacts the social-emotional development of their children. Meta-emotions can be short-term or long-term. The latter can be a source of discouragement or even psychological repression, or encouragement of specific emotions, having implications for personality traits, psychodynamics, family and group dynamics, organizational climate, emotional disorders, but also emotional awareness, and emotional intelligence.

In 1997, Gottman, Katz, & Hooven used the term meta-emotion to describe parents' reactions to their children's emotional displays. Baker, Fenning, & Crnic (2010) defined meta-emotion philosophy as "parental attitudes toward emotion".

Broadly speaking, meta-emotion encompasses both feelings and thoughts about emotion. According to Gottman et al. (2006), the term meta-emotion does not merely refer to an individual's emotional reactions to his or her own emotions, but refers also to the "executive functions of emotion" (243). Greenberg (2002) suggested that meta-emotions are to be considered a type of "secondary emotion", a temporal concept in which a secondary emotion follows a primary emotion. For example, anxiety (the secondary emotion) may follow anger (the primary emotion).

The term meta-emotion was unexpectedly coined as a result of the initial work of Gottman et al. (1996). For years, developmental psychology research has focused on parental affect, responsiveness, and parenting style. Gottman, Katz, & Hooven (1996) believed that there was not enough attention given to parents' feelings and thoughts about their own emotions and their children's emotions. While researching the effects of parents' marital relationship on children, Gottman et al. (1996) found that there was a large variety of attitudes and philosophies that parents held about their own emotions and their children's emotions. In order to examine these differences, Katz & Gottman (1986) developed a meta-emotion interview and deemed the term "meta-emotion structure", to refer to parents' feelings about feelings. They believed that meta-emotion was a "pervasive and understudied dimension in emotion research" (250). Katz & Gottman (1986) paralleled their concept of meta-emotion with that of the meta-cognition construct Metacognition. Hooven, Gottman, & Katz (1995) used the term "meta-emotion structure" to refer to "the parents' awareness of specific emotions, their awareness and acceptance of these emotions in their child, and their coaching of the emotion in their child" (231). The results of their study demonstrated that parental meta-emotion variables were related to their abilities to both interact with their children and resolve marital conflict. Gottman, Katz & Hooven (1996) suggested that parents' own feelings and thoughts about their emotions strongly influence the ways in which they parent.

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