Poster #204 - Does culture shape children’s interpretations and descriptions of emotions? Predicting their prosocial and aggressive behaviors

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Culture influences the way we view and communicate emotions (e.g., Trommsdorff & Heikamp, 2013). And the way of emotion communication in a given culture is reflected in its language (Wierzbicka, 1994). Although Asian cultures, such as Japan and China, are categorized as interdependent cultures, each culture has its own distinctive language and way of emotion communication. The present study investigated Japanese school-age children’s interpretations and descriptions of emotions and examined whether their emotion word usage predicts their prosocial and aggressive behaviors.

Participants were 63 Japanese 7-year-olds (M = 88.57 months, SD = 3.36; 30 boys) and their parents (M = 39.71 years, SD = 4.18; 5 fathers) living in Japan. The children read a wordless picture book One Frog Too Many (Mayer & Mayer, 1975), which contains various emotional scenes, to their parents. Children’s utterances were transcribed, and then emotion words were coded into categories using the Parent-Child Affect Communication Task (Denham & Kochanoff, 2002). In the coding system, emotion words include discrete emotions (e.g., happy, angry) and behavioral expressions of emotion (e.g., smile, glare), and for each emotion word the functions of utterance (e.g., commenting, questioning) and whose emotion the children referred to were coded. The parents rated their children’s prosocial and aggressive behaviors on a 24-item questionnaire (Takeda et al., 2004). Lastly, we assessed children’s general vocabulary using the Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (Ueno et al., 2008)

First, the results showed that the children used more negative emotion words than positive words. In positive emotion scenes, many children (63.5%) described harmonious relationships of characters, such as nakayoku naru (become friendly), instead of characters’ positive emotions, which may have contributed to less usage of positive emotion words. Next, to examine whether the children’s emotion word usage predicts their prosocial and aggressive behaviors, we performed hierarchical multiple regression analyses. The results showed that commenting to characters’ emotions and the number of characters referred to explained an additional 16 % of variance in prosocial behavior beyond the child’s age, gender, and general vocabulary (see Table 1), and that the total negative emotion words and reference to supporting characters accounted for an additional 24% of variance in aggressive behavior (see Table 2). Children’s commenting and the number of characters referred to positively predicted their prosocial behavior, whereas the total negative emotion words and reference to supporting characters negatively predicted their aggressive behavior.

The findings provide evidence that cultural values may shape children’s emotion communication. For instance, given interdependent cultures’ strong emphasis on group harmony (e.g., Trommsdorff & Heikamp, 2013), the Japanese children may have attended to and prioritized the harmonious interpersonal relationships over an individual’s positive emotions. Also, paying attention to the emotions of people in a group would help children figure out what kind of support or assistance others need and may lead them to act prosocially, which is an essential skill to acquire in interdependent cultures.

Authors

• Naomi Watanabe, NTT Communication Science Laboratories
  Presenting Author

• Tessei Kobayashi, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nagoya University
  Non-Presenting Author