Meta-Emotion

by John M. Gottman

This book describes research on the emotional communication between parents and children and its effect on the children's emotional development. Inspired by the work, and dedicated to the memory of Dr. Haim Ginott, it presents the results of initial exploratory work with meta-emotion--feelings about feelings. The initial study of meta-emotion generated some theory and made it possible to propose a research agenda. Clearly replication is necessary, and experiments are needed to test the path analytic models which have been developed from the authors' correlational data. The authors hope that other researchers will find these ideas interesting and stimulating, and will inspire investigation in this exciting new area of a family's emotional life.

Genres: Parenting, Psychology, Relationships, Counselling, Family, Marriage, Self Help

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Dr. Gottman was one of the Top 10 Most Influential Therapists of the past quarter-century by the Psychotherapy Networker. He is the author or co-author of over 200 published academic articles and more than 40 books, including the bestselling The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work; What Makes Love Last; Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love; The Relationship Cure; Why Marriages Succeed or Fail; and Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child — among many others. Dr. Gottman’s media appearances include Good Morning America, Today, CBS Morning News, and Oprah, as well articles in The New York Times, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, Glamour, Woman’s Day, People, Self, Reader’s Digest, and Psychology Today.

Co-founder of The Gottman Institute and co-founder of Affective Software, Inc. with his wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, John was also the Executive Director of the Relationship Research Institute. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Washington, where he founded “The Love Lab” at which much of his research on couples’ interactions was conducted.

Reviews

[Myridian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gottman is famous for his research on couples, but this book discusses his less well known but equally impressive work on parenting.

I just finished reading the book for the second time. The first time I was more interested in the information about cardiovascular reactivity and vagal tone. This time I was reading it as a parent and got very different things from the book. The thing I liked best from the book at this point though was that it really made me think about my own meta-emotion stucture and made me aware of some of the contradictions between how I understand emotions logically and ways in which I react to emotions as they are occurring.

Another thing I love is that, unlike many researchers, Gottman, Katz and Hooven are wonderfully clear in their writing. The theories from the parenting literature and the meta-emotion concept that inform their research make sense and they move these theories forward in a way that makes me wonder if the research was that clean to begin with or if they are just fantastic at telling the story of their results.

For Parents out there, here are the five components of the "emotion-coaching parent"
"1. The parent is aware of the child's emotion.
2. The parent sees the child's emotion as an opportunity for intimacy or teaching.
3. The parent helps the child to verbally label the emotions the child is having
4. The parent empathizes with or validates the child's emotion.
5. The parent helps the child problem solve." (sorry, don't know how to make this indented in the way a long quote should be....)

This is a wonderful book and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in having a research-based understanding of parenting and/or emotion.

I also have the book Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child The Heart of Parenting which I assume is the popular audience version of their research. I'll be interested to see how it compares with this book.

[Alexandra Chauran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really eye-opening information about how our culture feels about feelings. This book has made me more intentional about the way I process with my kids and gives value to the way that I want to parent. It is also full of surprising facts about families and emotions. A dry read, but an important one.