This study examined the relations between maternal reactions to children’s negative emotions and children’s socio-emotional outcomes, including psychological adjustment, emotion knowledge, and coping strategies. European American and Chinese immigrant mothers reported on their reactions to children’s ( N = 117, M = 7.14 years) negative emotions and on children’s psychological adjustment. One year later, children were interviewed for emotion knowledge and mothers reported on children’s use of coping strategies. Mothers from the two cultural groups reported the same level of supportive reactions to their children’s negative emotions, whereas Chinese immigrant mothers more often adopted what are commonly considered to be non-supportive strategies than did European American mothers. Whereas supportive maternal reactions were associated with better child outcomes in both cultures, maternal non-supportive reactions were negatively associated with children’s functioning for European American children but not for Chinese immigrant children. The findings shed critical light on the functional meaning of parenting practices in specific cultural contexts in shaping developmental outcomes.

How do changes in learners’ knowledge influence information seeking? We showed preschoolers ( N = 100) uncertain outcomes for events and let them choose which event to resolve. We found that children whose intuitive theories were at immature stages were more likely to seek information to resolve uncertainty about an outcome in the related domains, but children with more mature knowledge were not. This result was replicated in a second experiment but with the nuance that children at intermediate stages of belief development—when the causal outcome would be most ambiguous—were the most motivated to resolve the uncertainty. This effect was not driven by general uncertainty at the framework level but, rather, by the impact that framework knowledge has in accessing uncertainty at the model level. These results are the first to show the relationship between a learning preference and the developmental stage of a child’s intuitive theory.

Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120 Chinese children (4-9 years old). Each child played two computer games in which they listened to spoken words and judged the pleasantness of either the word meaning (Word game) or the vocal tone (Tone game) while ignoring the other aspect. Chinese children paid more spontaneous attention to vocal tones and less to word meanings than did EA children. These findings shed critical light on the role of culture in shaping affective cognitive processes during development.This research was supported by C.V. Starr Fellowship from Cornell East Asia Program to Yang Yang. We thank members of the Culture and Social Cognition Lab at Cornell University for their assistance. Special thanks go to the participants who made the study possible.