Children's Emotion Knowledge and Internalizing Problems: The Moderating Role of Culture

Enjoyment of Chinese and mathematics and school performance in Chinese children and adolescents

This 2-year longitudinal study examined relations between enjoyment of learning in Chinese and mathematics, two major subjects in Chinese schools, and indexes of school performance. The participants included 1041 students (501 boys) initially in third, fifth, and seventh grades (mean age = 10.49 years) in China. Data on enjoyment of Chinese and mathematics were collected from students' self-reports and data on school performance were collected from multiple sources in 2017 and 2019. The results showed that enjoyment of mathematics positively predicted later academic achievement, self-perceptions of academic competence, teacher-rated school competence, and peer-assessed leadership-social competence. Enjoyment of Chinese negatively predicted later mathematics achievement and self-perceptions of academic competence and nonsignificantly predicted other school performance variables. The results were discussed in Chinese context.

Resilience and Family Socialization Processes in Ethnic Minority Youth: Illuminating the Achievement-Health Paradox

Youth in marginalized communities who "strive" to rise above adversity, including systemic racism and poverty, are considered "resilient." African-American, Latinx, and Asian-American youth often achieve admirable academic success despite limited social capital and high early life stress by adopting a "striving persistent behavioral style" (SPBS). SPBS may be supported by family socialization processes that facilitate reliance on self-regulation processes. Unfortunately, a young person's resilience in one domain (i.e., academic) can come at a cost in other domains, including physical and mental health morbidities that are under-identified and under-treated. Indeed, research suggests a link between SPBS in the face of adversity and later health morbidities among ethnic minority youth. Herein, we describe SPBS as an adaptation to minority stress that not only promotes social mobility but may also stoke physical and mental health disparities. We review how family processes related to academic, emotional, and ethnic-racial socialization can facilitate the striving persistent behavioral style. We emphasize the double bind that ethnic minority families are caught in and discuss directions for future research and clinical implications for individual and family-level interventions. While needed, we argue that individual and family-level interventions represent a near-term work around. Solutions and factors that shape the need for SPBS and its cost must be addressed structurally.

Culture shapes preschoolers’ emotion recognition but not emotion comprehension: a cross-cultural study in Germany and Singapore

Contemporary approaches suggest that emotions are shaped by culture. Children growing up in different cultures experience culture-specific emotion socialization practices. As a result, children growing up in Western societies (e.g., US or UK) rely on explicit, semantic information, whereas children from East Asian cultures (e.g., China or Japan) are more sensitive towards implicit, contextual cues when confronted with others’ emotions. 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 an emotion recognition task employing European-American and East Asian child’s faces and the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004). 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. Accordingly, Singaporean preschoolers outperformed German preschoolers in the Recognition component of the TEC. The overall performance in TEC did not differ between the two samples. Findings of this study provide further evidence that emotion understanding is culturally shaped in accordance with culture-specific emotion socialization practices.

Individual Differences in Emotional Appraisal during Development: Analysis of the Role of Age, Gender, and Appraisal Accuracy

Emotional appraisal is the process by which different responses are generated from subjective assessments of different stimuli. Children and adults can react differently to the same stimulus. Emotional appraisal is crucial to define emotional processing and its consequent response rather than the properties of the stimulus itself. Age and gender modulate emotional appraisal during development. This study analyzed emotional appraisal in children aged 4 to 8-years-old. The children's emotional appraisal responses and the appraisal accuracy to images with positive, negative, and neutral valence be compared between the different age groups, and according to the gender of the participants. About the appraisal accuracy, the comparisons indicated significant differences for positive and negative images according to the age of the participants, with no differences in the appraisal accuracy of neutral images. Differences in appraisal accuracy for negative images were observed between the 4-years-old group compared to the 7- and 8-years-old group, as well as in 5-years-old participants compared to 7-years-old. Significant differences were found for the positive and negative images between girls and boys, but no differences were found for neutral images. Girls had more appraisals accuracy for positive and negative images. This work highlights the importance of analyzing individual differences associated with emotional processing at different stages of development. This interrogates research findings in which emotional appraisal is carried out considering the valence assigned by adults and highlights the need for a methodological approach that includes individual differences in the appraisal of stimuli used during development.

Why Should We All Be Cultural Psychologists? Lessons From the Study of Social Cognition

I call the attention of psychologists to the pivotal role of cultural psychology in extending and enriching research programs. I argue that it is not enough to simply acknowledge the importance of culture and urge psychologists to practice cultural psychology in their research. I deconstruct five assumptions about cultural psychology that seriously undermine its contribution to the building of a true psychological science, including that cultural psychology (a) is only about finding group differences, (b) does not appertain to group similarities, (c) concerns only group-level analysis, (d) is irrelevant to basic psychological processes, and (e) is used only to confirm the generalizability of theories. I discuss how cultural psychology can provide unique insights into psychological processes and further equip researchers with additional tools to understand human behavior. Drawing lessons from the 20 years of cultural research that my colleagues and I have done on the development of social cognition, including autobiographical memory, future thinking, self, and emotion knowledge, I demonstrate that incorporating cultural psychology into research programs is not only necessary but also feasible.