Poster #82 - Chinese Adolescents’ Perceived Maternal Responses to Their Positive Emotions: Longitudinal Implications for Their Socioemotional Functioning

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

While decades of research on parental emotional socialization has focused on parents’ reactions to children’s negative emotions, increasing attention has been paid to parents’ reactions to youth’s positive emotions (e.g., Yap, Allen, & Ladouceur, 2008). Among Western families, it has been found that parents’ enhancing responses to youth’s positive emotions (e.g., showing interest, engaging in and encouraging further activities that elicit positive emotions) tend to be conducive, whereas dampening responses (e.g.,, ignoring, downplaying or disapproving youth’s positive emotions or even getting irritated or anxious) tend to be detrimental to youth’s socioemotional functioning (indicated in, for example, experience of negative emotions, depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal; Ramakrishnan, Garside, Labella, & Klimes-Dougan, 2019; Yi, Gentzler, Ramsey, & Root, 2015). Whether or not such findings may generalize to Asian societies such as China is of particular interest, in that the cultural values, beliefs and norms concerning the experience, expression and regulation of positive emotions may vary between Asian and Western cultures (Miyamoto & Ma, 2011). For instance, although enhancing positivity may be fundamental to human well-being (Ryan & Deci, 2001), given the Chinese cultural beliefs and values such as dialectical thinking of emotions (e.g. “happiness may turn into misery”; Ji, Nisbett, & Su, 2001) and desirability of low-arousal emotions (e.g. feeling calm rather than excited; Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006), Chinese parents may not readily enhance children’s positive emotions, and the functional relevance of parents’ enhancing versus dampening responses to youth’s positive emotions to Chinese youth’s psychological functioning may be different than that for their Western counterparts. The current research explored this issue by investigating how Chinese adolescents’ perceived maternal responses to their positive emotions may relate longitudinally to their socioemotional functioning.
Adolescents (N=233; 111 females, mean age=12.19 years) of Han ethnicity in a megacity in China completed a survey twice approximately six months apart. At both time points, they reported on a 7-point scale their mothers’ enhancing and dampening responses to their positive emotions in hypothetical scenarios (e.g. happy, proud, excited), and various aspects of their own socioemotional functioning (i.e., vitality, self-esteem, experience of positive emotions versus negative emotions, anxiety and depression, and social withdrawal). All measures were internally reliable (αs>.75).
On average, adolescents reported their mothers to be more likely to use enhancing (means=5.00 and 5.76, SDs=1.35 and 1.60 at Time 1 and Time 2, respectively) than dampening responses to their positive emotions (means=3.22 and 3.83, SDs=1.10 and 1.18 at Time 1 and Time 2, respectively), t(232)=15.14, p<.001 at Time 1, and t(232)=18.21, p<.001 at Time 2. Over time, perceived maternal enhancing responses uniquely predicted greater vitality, self-esteem, positive emotions, and lesser anxiety and depression, whereas perceived maternal dampening responses uniquely predicted greater negative emotions and social withdrawal (see Table 1). The findings suggest that similar to what has been found in Western cultures, parents’ enhancing responses to adolescents’ positive emotions may facilitate whereas dampening responses may hinder Chinese adolescents’ socioemotional functioning, supporting the notion that enhancing positivity may be fundamental to human well-being universally.

Authors

• Zeyi Shi, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Qian Wang, the Chinese University of Hong Kong