They were then given two non-emotional practice scenarios and were asked to imagine each situation in a first person manner, as if it were happening to themselves.
Moreover, the questionnaire's format is coherent with previous research showing that emotional socialization practices may be emotion-specific (O'Neal & Magai, 2005), so the ESS included four emotions: sadness, anger, fear, and overjoy.
The use of instrumental and emotional feeding practices was assessed using general dichotomous items to cover the full construct, unlike previous studies, which measured the practices on 5- or 6-point scales (e.g. [ 12, 13, 23, 25]).
It means that we can deepen and continue to refine our work around social and emotional learning practices, and that we can begin to deeper evaluate how our work with students links to student achievement.
On the one hand, a study exploring memories about food showed that obese patients reported emotional feeding practices of their parents during their youth [ 20].
Emotional feeding practices were measured with a set of items that started with one dichotomous question asking mothers whether they used foods to comfort their child (no/yes).
Our results show that mothers in our sample mainly used unhealthy products in the context of instrumental and emotional feeding practices.
Assessing the association between maternal use of instrumental and emotional feeding practices and children's actual intake was beyond the scope of our study.
Since we did not find relevant associations between familiarity with the recommendation and the use of instrumental or emotional feeding practices, our study does not indicate that it is important for parents to know these recommendations.
However, the use of our dichotomous measures to assess the use of instrumental and emotional feeding practices seems to provide some added value compared to previous studies that reported mean scores, since it forced participants to decide whether or not they used the feeding practices, and as such clearly revealed how many parents were actually using the practices.
