The importance of mutual positive expressivity in social adjustment: understanding the role of peers and gender.

Positive emotion (PE) is often viewed as a social phenomenon (e.g., Parkinson, 1996). Most emotions have the capability of being experienced in a social context; however, what makes PE unique is the type of action tendency that it often elicits. For example, frequent displays of PE are thought to facilitate social interactions because PE typically elicits an approach tendency (Frijda, Kuipers, & ter Schure, 1989). Moreover, children (and adults) often prefer being with others who express relatively high levels of PE (Halberstadt, Denham, & Dunsmore, 2001; Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005; Sroufe, Schork, Motti, Lawroski, & LaFreniere, 1984). Thus, it is not surprising that displays of PE are hypothesized to elicit positive responses in other people (see Fredrickson, 1998, 2001). Investigations of children’s PE, however, typically have focused only on the target child's emotional display. This focus excludes the relational context of PE (i.e., peers’ emotional reactions). The recipient of a child's emotional response is important to examine because the recipient has the potential to shape current social interactions and influence future responses of the child. Specifically, if the recipient expresses PE in response to the child’s initial PE (i.e., mutual PE), the social interaction is likely to be a positive experience and thus promote social affiliation (see Fredrickson, 1998, 2001) and continued engagement. This social connectedness is hypothesized to foster the development of meaningful relationships and the promotion of individuals’ positive adjustment (Papa & Bonanno, 2008). Mutual PE should facilitate future positive experiences and thereby positively impact children’s social adjustment more than when children’s initial displays of PE are not reciprocated (i.e., non-mutual PE). To highlight the importance of the relational context of PE, the present study examined the relation of young children’s observed mutual PE with their peers to their positive and negative social adjustment. We also examined the relation between a child's observed overall PE (i.e., target child PE regardless of peer context) and social adjustment. Children’s overall PE included all peer interactions where the child expressed PE. Assessing children’s overall PE was important in order to compare these findings to those that included only specific situations of mutual PE. Similar to other researchers (Lengua, 2002; McDowell & Parke, 2005), we define positive social adjustment as consisting of a variety of social skills and socially appropriate behaviors (e.g., cooperation, prosocial behavior) and negative social adjustment as consisting of a variety of externalizing and internalizing social behavior problems (e.g., anxiety, hyperactivity, disruption). A related issue of interest is whether mutuality in PE matters more for some child pairings than for others. The most fundamental basis upon which children select peer interaction partners is gender. Specifically, girls tend to interact more often with other girls than with boys, and boys tend to interact more often with other boys than with girls (Maccoby, 1998; Martin & Fabes, 2001). Moreover, researchers have found a positive relation between children’s observed PE and same-gender play (Martin & Fabes, 2001). Other researchers have found that children’s observed PE during gender-segregated play is higher than PE during gender-integrated play (Galligan, Fabes, Hanish, Martin, & Goble, 2011). It is likely that mutual PE varies depending on the gender pairings of social interactions. What is less understood is the implication of these possible differences on children’s social adjustment. The present study is unique in its investigation of variation in mutual PE as a function of the children’s gender and that of their play partners.