Emotional skills such as emotion recognition (being able to recognize someone else’s emotions) and emotion expression (being able to express one’s own emotions) are critical to healthy socioemotional functioning. Deficits in these emotional skills can have long-term implications, as emotional dysregulation is a large factor of both internalizing and externalizing disorders. Children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits such as low prosocial behaviors, empathy, and guilt, are also known to have low emotional sensitivity, which further predisposes them for negative outcomes. Parental scaffolding – that is, parental-guided learning – could be an important intervention point. In emotion terms, parental scaffolding has been studied in how vocal tone or a parent’s own emotion expression in response to certain situations can be important cues to help a child understand how to recognize and express emotions themselves. Parent-child conversations about emotions have also been shown to be important to promoting emotional skills in children; however, little work has examined what exactly a parent is saying in these conversations to help promote these critical emotional skills, especially among children with high versus low levels of CU traits. This study will use a picture book story task, auditory emotion recognition task, and verbal fluency task to investigate the relationship between parental emotional scaffolding and child emotional recognition and expression, as well as exploring whether CU traits moderate these relationships. Results could inform future treatments to mitigate emotional deficiencies in children.