Storybooks written for young children contain rich information on emotions and act as important educational tools for children’s emotion socialization. The current study aims to investigate how cultural norms regarding emotions are portrayed in the narratives of popular storybooks across cultures. Thus, in this study, 38 bestselling Chinese storybooks written by Chinese authors and 42 bestselling American storybooks by European-American writers were compared. The narratives were coded with a focus on emotion-related content and further analysed using binary logistic regressions. The findings revealed that American storybooks were more likely to present positive (vs. negative) emotions, negative powerful (vs. negative powerless) emotions, and supportive (vs. unsupportive and teaching) responses to negative emotions than Chinese storybooks, but less likely to present social (vs. personal) themes, other-based (vs. self-based) attribution, and teaching (vs. supportive and unsupportive) responses to negative emotions. However, the results found no cultural variation in the prevalence of intrinsic (vs. extrinsic) interpersonal emotion regulation. The findings suggest that elements of emotion-related content coexist in both cultures although the relative salience of such content differs across cultures.
The Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire (IRQ) is a scale developed to measure the tendency and efficacy of intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation across positive and negative affective states. As the psychometric properties of the IRQ across cultures and different ages have not been well established, the current study was conducted to examine the applicability of the translated IRQ in a sample of Chinese young adolescents (initial n = 487; 50.20% are males; M = 14.52 years old, SD = .75). The original four-factor structure of the IRQ (i.e., negative-tendency, negative-efficacy, positive-tendency, and positive-efficacy) and other parsimonious models were examined and compared using confirmatory factor analysis. The results demonstrated that only the correlated-four-factor model had acceptable model fit indices. The internal consistencies of the four subscales were all above .70. Strict measurement invariance (i.e., configural, metric, and scalar) was achieved between males and females. In addition, latent mean comparison showed that females reported higher negative-efficacy and positive-tendency than males, while no gender variations were found for the remaining two factors. The validity of the IRQ was further supported by its convergent-discriminant associations with emotional well-being and distress, emotional expressivity, social competence, empathic responding, cognitive reappraisal, and delinquent behavior. Taken together, the IRQ is a reliable and valid measure for Chinese young adolescents' intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation.
Public Significance StatementThe present study suggests that after being translated to Mandarin, the Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire (IRQ), which was originally developed by Williams et al. (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2018, 115, p. 224) to assess the tendency and efficacy of interpersonal emotion regulation in Western adults, applies to Chinese adolescents. It documents that the psychological attribute measured by IRQ may be an important concept universal for broader population groups and cultural contexts.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.