In 1997, Gottman, Katz, & Hooven used the term meta-emotion to describe parents' reactions to their children's emotional displays.
[This quote needs a citation] Katz & Gottman (1986) paralleled their concept of meta-emotion with that of the meta-cognition construct Metacognition.
[8] 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.
[5] In their paper published in 1996, Gottman, Katz & Hooven outlined different types of parental meta-emotion philosophy.
[5] Parents may partake in a dismissing approach by attempting to distract the child or belittling the causes of the negative emotions.
[11] There has been a growing interest in examining the impact of the various types of parental meta-emotion philosophies on children's emotional states and depressive symptoms.
They found that when parents held an emotion-coaching philosophy, the adolescents tended to have fewer behavioral and emotional issues.
"[12] Similarly, Katz & Hunter (2007) examined the effects of maternal meta-emotion on adolescent depressive symptoms.
The authors found that adolescents with high levels of depressive symptoms tended to have mothers who were less accepting of their own emotions.
In conclusion, this study demonstrated a strong correlation between maternal meta-emotion philosophy and adolescent depression.
[13] Another study found that mothers with a meta-emotion philosophy that is higher in both awareness and acceptance were correlated with fewer negative social behaviors during mother-child interactions.
To do so, they examined the impact of both temperament (nature) and parental meta-emotion philosophy (nurture) on the development of coping skills in early adolescents.
For example, they found that emotion-coaching parenting was related to distraction coping strategies for children with lower negative affect and higher surgency.
[16] Gottman et al. found that fathers who are more aware of their sadness were more affectionate and have wives who were "less contemptuous and belligerent".
Mothers who followed an emotion-coaching philosophy with concern to sadness tended to have husbands were "less disgusted and less belligerent".
[18] Gottman et al. found that mothers who were aware of their children's anger were less contemptuous, but also less affectionate toward their husbands.
The emotion identification skill that girls enter high school with may influence their friendship composition into late adolescence.
[23] The primary goal of the most recent Meta-Emotion Interview (MEI) is to gain a clear idea of how an individual experiences a particular emotion.
Finally, coaching refers to the degree to which individuals are able to identify and accept others' (i.e.: spouse or child) emotional experience in a positive manner.
The psychometric properties (i.e., reliability and validity) of the MESQ were found to be more than acceptable and the measure has been used in conjunction with child temperament to predict social outcomes for children based on theory of Goodness of Fit.