Social-contextual influences on expectancies for managing anger and sadness: the transition from middle childhood to adolescence.

This study examined the influence of emotion type (i.e., anger, sadness), audience type (i.e., mother, father, best friend), gender, and age on 140 5th-, 8th-, and 11th-grade adolescents' emotion management decisions, emotional self-efficacy, and outcome expectancies. Participants were read 8 vignettes and responded to 8 questions per vignette. Results indicated that 8th-grade adolescents reported regulating emotion most and expected the least interpersonal support from mothers. Children expressed greater self-efficacy and regulation of sadness than of anger. Boys reported dissembling emotion and expecting a negative interpersonal response to emotional behavior more than did girls. Children were more concerned with protecting feelings of friends than with protecting feelings of fathers.