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

Abstract

Research on children's Emotion Understanding (EU) has been dominated by middle-class samples from Western societies. We studied cultural and Socioeconomic Status (SES) variation in young children's EU in a high SES sample (n = 50) and a low SES sample (n = 50) of Brazilian preschoolers using the Test of Emotion Comprehension. We found that the high SES sample performed better at both the overall and component levels than the low SES sample on EU. The differences were especially substantial for the recognition of basic emotions, with the low SES children recognizing negative emotions better than positive and neutral emotions. In addition, we compared the two SES samples of Brazilian children to same-age samples from Norway, Italy and Peru. Between the Brazilian and the European samples and the Brazilian and other non-European samples, the variation in EU was observed to be more related to SES than to culture.

Evidence for similar conceptual progress across diverse cultures in children’s understanding of emotion

“…Indeed, the TEC relies on the schematic, cartoon-like depiction of facially expressed emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, and anger) and the description of episodes involving artifacts (e.g., a bus stop, a birthday cake, a bicycle, a photo album) that may not be familiar to children in remote, rural communities. As noted earlier, the studies conducted by Kårstad et al (2016) with Brazilian children and by Tenenbaum et al (2004) with Quechua-speaking Peruvian children reported such challenges. Accordingly, careful selection and adjustment of test items may be needed for valid testing.…”

“…Two of the 11 studies tested children in South America. One study involved 100 Brazilian 3- to 5-year-olds, half from lower-class families and half from middle-class families (Kårstad et al, 2016). As compared to the 3- and 5-year-olds tested by Pons et al (2004), performance was quite poor on two components—the recognition and external cause components—especially among the lower-class children.…”

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.…”

Pathways to behavior problems in Norwegian kindergarten children: The role of parent emotion socialization and child emotion understanding

“…However, factors other than culture are even more important predictors of emotion understanding. When comparing TEC results in samples of high and low socioeconomic status (SES) Brazilian 4‐year‐olds, and Peruvian (low SES), Norwegian (high SES) and Italian (high SES) samples, Kårstad, Vikan, Berg‐Nielsen, Moreira, de Abreu and Rique (2016) concluded that the observed differences in emotion understanding were more related to SES, than to culture.…”