Comparing subscales of emotion understanding and emotion regulation in preschool children with and without sibling

The purpose of this research was to compare emotion understanding and emotion regulation between children with and without sibling. Research method was casual-comparative and statistic population consisted of 4-6 years old children who were present in kindergartens of Tehran city in 2017. From among them, 60 children were selected through multi-stage cluster sampling and matched based on age and sex. Data collection instruments included “emotion matching task” (Izard, Haskins, Schultz, Trentacosta & King, 2003), “emotion situation production task” (Wang, Hutt, Kulkofsky, McDermott & Wei, 2006) and “emotion regulation checklist” (Shields & Cicchetti, 1997). Data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA. The result showed that children with sibling, scored significantly higher than only children on emotion understanding and its subscales (emotion situation knowledge, expressive emotion knowledge and receptive emotion knowledge) (p<0.05). They also scored significantly lower than only children on “lability/negativity” subscale of “emotion regulation checklist” (p<0.05) which indicates more balanced emotional reactions. The result of this study suggested that growing up with sibling during preschool years provides unique opportunity for improving children emotional competencies.