Parental Emotion Socialization Around the World: A Close Look at Culturally Embedded Guiding Factors

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Parental emotion socialization (ES) involves processes where parents enact behaviors to influence children’s emotional experience, expression, and regulation. Because of the well-recognized impact of ES on children’s socioemotional competence, it is important to identify potential antecedents of ES to clarify how and why parents engage in various ES practices. Furthermore, varying cultural models of self and relationships shape parents’ emotion-related values and beliefs in association with ES practices. Recent works have called for cross-cultural studies to build understanding of culturally embedded factors guiding ES. The current symposium responds to these calls by highlighting four cross-cultural studies with diverse measurements that explore ES in relation to cultural factors. Presentations address ES of parents with children from infancy to early childhood. The first paper includes German and Ecuadorian mothers of infants and examines maternal ethnotheories regarding ideal infant affect in relation to mother-infant interactions and infants’ social smiling. The second paper investigates the effects of emotion socialization goals on maternal regulatory practices of toddlers’ negative emotion in Turkey and India. The third paper centers two types of parents’ emotion-related beliefs in Turkey and the United States – autonomy and parental knowledge – in relation to parental self-reported and observed ES behaviors. The final paper explores mothers’ emotion competence goals, meta-emotion philosophy, and ES practices towards 4- to 5-year-old children in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States. Altogether, our symposium contributes to a comprehensive understanding of ES in the family system from a cross-cultural perspective and has prevention and intervention implications.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chairs

• Danhua Zhu, University of California - Irvine

• Wolfgang Josef Friedlmeier, Grand Valley State University

Individual Presentations

• The Emergence of Social Smiling in Mother-Infant Interaction – Ethnotheories and Behavioral Dynamics in two Cultures - Presenting Author: Joscha Kärtner, University of Münser; Helen Wefers, University of Münster

• Inter and Intracultural Effects of Emotion Socialization Goals on Maternal Strategies and Toddler’s Negative Emotions - Presenting Author: Wolfgang Josef Friedlmeier, Grand Valley State University; Tripti Kathuria, N/A; Feyza Corapci, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi (BOUN)

• Parents’ Beliefs about Emotions and Emotion Socialization Behaviors in Turkey and the United States - Presenting Author: Danhua Zhu, University of California - Irvine; Şükran Kılıç, AKSARAY UNIVERSITY; Erika Hernandez, BInghamton University; Julie C Dunsmore, University of Houston

• Cross- and Within-Culture Comparison of Maternal Emotion Socialization in China and the USA: A Mixed Methods Study - Presenting Author: Meingold Hiu-Ming Chan, University of British Columbia (UBC); Xin Feng, The Ohio State University; Zhenlin Wang, The Education University of Hong Kong; Li Wang