Culture Shapes Children’s Emotion Understanding. A Cross-cultural Study Investigating German and Singaporean Preschoolers

• In Event: Emotional Competence in Childhood: Underlying Mechanisms and Consequences

Abstract

Although emotions are a universal phenomenon across different species and cultures (Ekman & Friesen, 1971), contemporary approaches suggest that many aspects of emotion processing are shaped by culture (Mesquita et al., 2016). For example, members of Western cultures (e.g., US or UK) frequently express and verbalize emotional states (Mesquita & Frijda, 1992), whereas members of East Asian cultures (e.g., Japan or China) express emotions in a more implicit and indirect manner (Matsumoto, 2009). Children growing up in different cultures frequently experience these culture-specific verbal and non-verbal emotion behaviors, which steadily shape their emotion development (e.g., Camras et al., 2014). As a result, children growing up in Western societies are expected to predominantly rely on explicit, semantic information, whereas children from East Asian cultures are expected to be more sensitive towards implicit, contextual cues when confronted with others’ emotions. Several studies support these assumptions by demonstrating that Chinese or Japanese children were more accurate at recognizing emotions from facial expressions or emotional vocal tones than Dutch or American children (Kawahara et al., 2021; Matsumoto & Kishimoto, 1983). In contrast, British or US American children outperformed Chinese children in emotion comprehension tasks involving the explicit communication of emotional states (Wang, 2003; Li & Yu, 2015). The aim of the present study was to investigate two aspects of preschoolers’ emotion understanding (emotion recognition and emotion comprehension) in a cross-cultural setting. To this end, Singaporean and German preschoolers were tested with a facial emotion recognition task employing European-American and East Asian child’s faces based on the Child Affective Facial Expression set (CAFE; LoBue & Thrasher, 2015), and the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004). It was assumed that Singaporean preschoolers would outperform German preschoolers in the emotion recognition task, while German preschoolers were expected to outperform Singaporean preschoolers on the TEC. In total, 129 German and Singaporean preschoolers (mean age 5.34 years) participated. Results indicate that preschoolers were able to recognize emotions of child’s faces above chance level. In line with previous findings, Singaporean preschoolers were more accurate in recognizing emotions from facial stimuli compared to German preschoolers (Figure 1). Moreover, Singaporean preschoolers outperformed German preschoolers in the Recognition component of the TEC. The overall performance in TEC did not differ between the two samples (Figure 2). Findings of this study provide further evidence that emotion understanding is culturally shaped in accordance with culture-specific emotion socialization practices.

Authors

• Corina Möller, Saarland University
  Presenting Author

• Yang Yang, Nanyang Technological University

• Rebecca Bull, Macquarie University

• Gisa Aschersleben, Saarland University