Cultural Influences on Children’s Coping with Everyday Stressors

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

In this symposium, we examine how children across cultures cope with everyday stressors, including challenging tasks, emotional distress and practical or emotional problems. Our symposium highlights the need to recognize that such coping reflects not only socialization processes but children’s developing knowledge and culturally based outlooks. Adopting an innovative methodology that captures the bi-directional nature of socialization processes, Talk 1 assesses real-time mother-child interactions that occur in solving a challenging puzzle task. Whereas Chinese mothers are less autonomy supportive than are US mothers, mothers from both cultural groups provide greater autonomy support in response to child’s defeat. Adopting a longitudinal design, Talk 2 assesses mother-child conversations and their relationship to children’s emotion knowledge and coping strategies in multiple home visits. Maternal references to behaviors have more negative impacts for European American children than Chinese immigrant children, whereas maternal references to internal states positively predict the variety of children’s coping strategies in both cultural groups. Talk 3 challenges past claims that East Asians tend to suppress their emotions. Study 1 shows that Chinese adults consider both emotional and practical aspects of everyday stressors as important, whereas European-American adults privilege the emotional aspects. Employing a creative story narration methodology, Study 2 shows that, among both adults and children, Chinese acknowledge negative emotions they are experiencing and engage in self-initiated coping of emotional stressors more frequently than Americans. Finally, an expert in culture and child development will discuss the implications these studies have for future research on coping and cultural psychology in general.

Sub Unit

• Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Chair

• ZHENLAN WANG, Yale University

Discussant

• Jin Li, Brown University

Individual Presentations

• Maternal Autonomy Support and Control in the US and China: Moment-to-Moment Transactions with Preschoolers’ Behaviors - Presenting Author: Xi Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Non-Presenting Author: Nancy McElwain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Non-Presenting Author: Eva Pomerantz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Mother-Child Reminiscing: Relations to Children’s Emotion Knowledge and Coping in European-American and Chinese-Immigrant Families - Presenting Author: Yang Yang, Nanyang Technological University; Non-Presenting Author: Jessie Bee Kim Koh, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen; Non-Presenting Author: Qi Wang, Cornell University

• Cultural and Age Differences in Emotion Regulation in Coping with Stressors - Presenting Author: ZHENLAN WANG, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Xin Alice Zhao, East China Normal University; Non-Presenting Author: Joan G Miller, New School for Social Research