Poster #174 - Brazilian Children Attribute More Sadness, Less Fear Than US Children to Moral/Social-Conventional Violators Facing Discipline

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

Social domain theory (Smetana, Jambon, & Ball, 2014) spurred much data on parental socialization of children's moral reasoning. However, parental guidance or discipline remains surprisingly absent in studies of children's emotion attributions to moral victimizers (Arsenio & Ramos-Marcuse, 2014). The present report addresses this gap by comparing Brazilian and US American children's emotion attributions to social-conventional and moral violators facing maternal discipline. Despite growing individualist practices worldwide, Brazilians remain more collectivist than US Americans on values (familism, obedience over independence in child socialization, and group cohesion/harmony over individual self-expression; de Oliveira & Nisbett, 2017; Santos, Varnum, & Grossman, 2017). Hypotheses were: 1) Brazilians would more frequently attribute to violators emotions (happiness/sadness) which are often related to group orientation/interdependence/affiliative behavior; US Americans would attribute more ego-focused emotions (anger/fear) functionally linked to autonomy preservation (Izard, 1991; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). 2) Violation tolerance and punishment expectancy would mediate these differences. 3) Based on Mesquita's report (2001) of collectivists' greater attention to intentionality and meaning in social interactions, discipline strategy and violators' intentionality would moderate Brazilians' emotion attributions. Participants were demographically-matched, 5-to-10-year-old children from Brazil (N=62) and the US (N=67). We used a questionnaire with 36 vignettes, each containing a matched-gender protagonist committing a prototypical moral (hurting a peer, breaking mom's favorite vase, stealing a peer's jacket) or social-conventional violation (wearing clothes inside out, stepping out of line in school, making noise while teacher talks). Violations were purposeful or accidental, followed by maternal discipline: Spanking, Inductive Reasoning (explaining to violator how his/her behavior affected others), or Time-Out. Emotion attributions were measured by asking participants to point to one emotion expression (happy, angry, sad, afraid, neutral) in validated photos of multiracial children (Morgan, et al., 2009) that best represented the protagonist/violator's emotion at the time of violation, and at subsequent discipline. The first 12 items introduced a question of whether it was OK or not to behave that way, then graded as 1=very bad through 4=very much OK (Tolerance, α=.85). Participants were asked whether they would get in trouble or not for acting that way, quantified as 1=No trouble through 3=Much trouble (Punishment Expectancy, α=.89). Gender effects were non-significant. With age, children attributed less Anger to violators at the time of violation (p<.05), and more Sadness (p=.01), less Joy, Fear, or Neutrality (p<.01) at the time of discipline. Controlling for child age, mixed-model GLMs showed that US children attributed significantly more Fear than Brazilians to protagonists both for violation (p<.05) and for discipline (p<.01). Brazilians attributed marginally more Happiness (p=.06) than US counterparts for violation. If violators acted intentionally, Brazilians attributed more Happiness but less Sadness than US peers for violation, p<.01. Overall, violators received more Happiness attributions if disciplined by Induction than by Spanking or Time-Out (p<.05); this pattern was stronger for Brazilians, p<.01, Fig.1. Relative to US children, Brazilians attributed more Sadness for discipline, especially if spanking followed intentional violation (Fig.2). Haye's (2008) 2-1-1 model tests yielded non-significant effects to hypothesized mediators. Results support individualist-collectivist distinctions in emotion attributions to young transgressors.

Authors

• Ebenezer A. de Oliveira, Malone University
  Presenting Author

• Deise M. L. F. Mendes, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susana K. de M. Oliveira, Universidade Federal do Ceará
  Non-Presenting Author

• Luciana F. Pessôa, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro
  Non-Presenting Author