Introduction: Crèche educators work as socializers of children's emotions. Consistently with the literature about parents, they can adopt two emotional styles toward children's emotions (Ciucci et al., 2015, 2018): the coaching style that involves the awareness, acceptance, and regulation of children's emotions, and the dismissing style that is characterized by the tendency to minimize, ignore, or reject children's emotions, above all the negative ones. According to the Meta-emotion philosophy conceptual framework (Gottman et al., 1996, 1997), these styles encompass an organized set of feelings and thoughts concerning one's own emotions as well as the child's emotions. So, meta-emotions - emotional reactions about one's emotions - can illuminate processes in (non-)acceptance of emotions.
Purpose: This study aims to investigate educators' personal meta-emotions that underpin coaching and dismissing styles.
Methods: 233 crèche educators from Center of Italy (average age = 40.38 years, SD = 10.68) were requested to fill out the MES (Mitmansgruber et al., 2009) and the CEESQ (Ciucci et al., 2015) questionnaires that provided, respectively, a measure of meta-emotions (i.e., interest, suppression, compassionate care) and two styles used to deal with children's emotions (i.e., Coaching and Dismissing).
Results: Regression analyses showed that higher levels of interest and compassionate care uniquely and independently contribute to coaching style toward children's emotions; higher levels of interest and lower levels of suppression uniquely account for dismissing toward children's emotions; moreover, compassion - if associated with high levels of suppression - also accounts for greater dismissing.
Conclusion: Results evidenced that crèche educators' emotional experience (i.e., meta-emotions) may play an important role in the way they socialize children's emotions. We discuss the role of meta-emotions on personal and professional life.