Implications of Family Expressiveness for Adolescents' Emotional Adjustment in the United States and China

• In Event: 3-114 - Family Dynamics and Adolescents’ Socioemotional Adjustment Across Cultural Contexts

Integrative Statement

Family context is an important arena for children’s emotional development, as emotional socialization takes place within the family. Through repeated interactions with family members, children acquire cultural-specific knowledge about emotional processes (Cole, Tamang, & Shrestha, 2006; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). As one mechanism of such emotional socialization, family expressiveness, i.e., predominant pattern of verbal and nonverbal expressions within the family (Halberstadt, Cassidy, Stifter, Parke, & Fox, 1995), is deemed important in children’s emotional adjustment. Prior research has documented that positive family expressiveness is generally associated with children’s positive psychosocial functioning, although the findings are mixed for the implications of negative family expressiveness (Halberstadt, Crisp, & Eaton, 1999).

As individual’s emotional experience and expression are largely dependent on cultural norms and values (Eid & Diener, 2001) and these norms and values guide family’s emotional socialization (Friedlmeier, Corapci, & Cole, 2011), it is crucial to understand family expressiveness in diverse cultural contexts. Specifically, with regard to emotional expression, research has shown that open emotional displays are often considered normative in more individualistic cultures (e.g., North America), whereas in more collectivistic cultures (e.g., East Asian countries), emphasis is often on control and moderation of emotions (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Safdar et al., 2009). Thus, the current study sought to examine (a) the role of family expressiveness on children’s emotional adjustment (i.e., emotional experiences and self-esteem) and (b) whether the extent to which the associations between family expressiveness and adolescents’ adjustment differs between the United States and China. It was hypothesized that positive family expressiveness would be associated with adolescents’ experience of positive emotions and self-esteem over time and this link would be stronger among American adolescents (vs. Chinese). For negative family expressiveness, however, no specific a priori hypothesis was generated, given mixed findings in the literature.

We used data of 566 American (n = 331) and Chinese (n = 235) early adolescents (age range: 11-14) who reported on their family members’ expressiveness of positive and negative emotions, their own experience of positive and negative emotions, and self-esteem, two times over the course of one year. Autoregressive models were evaluated in the context of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to examine the longitudinal associations between family emotional expressiveness and adolescents’ emotional functioning. In addition, nested model comparisons were used to evaluate whether the strength of these associations differed across countries. Results indicated that, in both the United States and China, positive family expressiveness predicted gains in adolescents’ positive emotions and self-esteem six months later, with no difference in the strength of the associations between the two countries. However, country differences were evident in the associations between family positive expressiveness and adolescents’ experience of negative emotions over time, such that positive family expressiveness predicted dampened levels of negative emotions only among American but not Chinese adolescents. Negative family expressiveness was not associated with gains in adolescents’ emotional adjustment in both countries (see Table 1). Taken together, our findings highlight the importance of culture in understanding the role of family expressiveness in adolescents’ emotional adjustment.

Authors

• Yena Kyeong, University of California, Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Cecilia Cheung, University of California, Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author