Emotion understanding: A cross-cultural comparison between Italian and German preschoolers

Abstract

This is an author version of the contribution published on:Questa è la versione dell'autore dell'opera: AbstractItaly and Germany belong to the Latin and the Germanic cultural cluster, respectively, and show e.g. diverse languages, religious practices, rearing styles and socialization goals. Given potential cultural differences in the developmental goals of independence and interdependence, the present work sought to explore developmental differences between German preschoolers understood that expressed and felt emotion may differ. Cultural differences within the Western industrial world thus likely regard specific components rather than overall competence. Results will be discussed in relation to cultural belonging, controlling for maternal educational level, presence of siblings and multilingualism.

The understanding of emotion among young Chinese children

“…Thus, TEC results from the UK, Brazil, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Germany, and Peru reveal similar age changes (Bender et al, 2015;Karstad et al, 2016;Molina, Bulgarelli, Henning, & Aschersleben, 2014;Pons et al, 2004;Roazzi et al, 2009;Tenenbaum, Visscher, Pons, & Harris, 2004). However, findings for the age at which children from different cultural backgrounds understand the hiding of felt emotion have been mixed.…”

“…We compared this rank-order to those observed in three other samples: British children (Pons et al, 2003), German children, and Italian children (Molina et al, 2014), as shown in Table 1. The British and German cultures can be regarded as representative of individualistic cultures whereas the Chinese and Italian cultures can be regarded as representative of more collectivist cultures (See Table 1 for the size, age range, and mean age of each of the four samples).…”

“…Consistent with earlier findings, they observed an overall improvement between 4 and 6 years in the differentiation between felt and expressed emotion but 4-year-old girls in India outperformed 4-year-old girls in the UK. Molina et al (2014) In the present study, we examined the development of emotion understanding among young children in China. China has several distinctive cultural characteristics: a long history as a single nation, a vast territory and population united by a common language (almost all people speak Mandarin), an emphasis on deference and respect for authority, and a one party system, with its own definition of democracy and freedom of speech.…”

Young Brazilian Children’s Emotion Understanding: A Comparison within and across Cultures

“…Some studies find a positive relationship between SES and better EU (Cutting & Dunn, 1999;Dunn & Brown, 1994), and other studies report no effect of SES on preschoolers' EU (Karstad, Wichstrom, Reinfjell, Belsky, & Berg-Nielsen, 2015;Molina, Bulgarelli, Henning, & Aschersleben, 2014). The majority of this research is dominated by research on WEIRD middle-class samples, i.e., samples from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies, which according Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010), may not be representative populations from which to make generalizations.…”

Social skills in preschool children with unilateral and mild bilateral hearing loss

“…Although the limitations of representability, as discussed below, must be kept in mind, we believe that our findings are likely to be representative for the population of children with HA in Norway. Caution is needed when generalizing the results to populations in other countries, as emotion comprehension and the parents' awareness thereof are likely to differ between cultures (Molina, Bulgarelli, Henning, & Aschersleben, 2014).…”