Abstract: This study conducted two experiments using the implicit association test to explore that parents implicit attitude about their child are uniquely associated with emotion, and further its relationship with emotional prediction. Implicit attitudes (assessed by the IAT) must be associated with parenting above and beyond any associations with explicit attitudes. The first experiment explored parents implicit attitude toward their child and
emotional words association. The results revealed that compared with others children, parents response time toward their own child and association with positive emotional words was shorter, indicating that parents have an implicit attitude toward their own child and positive emotional association. The second experiment randomly divided parents into two groups, i.e., one high and one low cognitive pressure group, and compared whether there existed any difference in the role of implicit attitude on the emotional prediction in a negative emotional context as they differed in implicit attitude. The results showed that the group of parents who mainly relied on implicit attitude got a significant low score in their prediction of their childs negative emotions as compared with those who didnt, indicating that parents in the former group were insufficient in processing of situational information, and as a result, got predictive scores consistent with their implicit attitude. This study shows that whether parents mainly rely on their implicit attitude toward their child and emotional word association will influence the level of their prediction of the childs emotions.

Key words: parent-child relationship, implicit attitude, emotional prediction