Abstract
This study demonstrated how mothers express their emotions to thei r infants and how they evaluated their children's behaviors. One-hundred-forty mothers with 13 months old infants participated in the experiment. The mothers answered four questionnaires, two of which analyzed the relationships between the mothers' style of expressing emotions and their children's behaviors. The mothers were divided into four groups according to the score on factor loadings of their expression styles: expressing both negative and positive emotions (N+P+, N=43), suppressing both negative and positive emotions (N-P-, N=40), expressing negative emotions and suppressing positive emotions (N+P-, N=26) and suppressing negative emotions and expressing positive emotions (N-P+, N=31). Compared with other mothers, N-P+ mothers saw their infants as expressing their emotions more vividly, N+P- mothers considered their infants' emotions more suppressively, N-P- mothers considered their infants to be inclined to restrict their emotions and N+P+ mothers considered their infants to behave more shyly.
