Emotion Talk in Mother-Child Conversations of the Shared Past: The Effects of Culture, Gender, and Event Valence

• Published in: Journal of cognition and development Vol. 6; no. 4; pp. 489 - 506
• Main Authors: Fivush, Robyn, Wang, Qi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc 01.11.2005; Psychology Press; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: American English; Asian Culture; Asian people; China; Chinese; Cognitive Processes; Comparative studies; Cultural Differences; Cultural Influences; Culture; Discourse Structure; Emotional Response; Emotions; Foreign Countries; Gender; Gender Differences; Interpersonal Communication; Lexical Choice; Maternal Speech; Memory; Middle Class; Mothers; Negative Attitudes; Parent Child Interaction; Parent Child Relationship; Preschool Children; Recall (Psychology); United States; White people; Whites; United States; China
• ISSN: 1524-8372; 1532-7647
• DOI: 10.1207/s15327647jcd0604_3

We examined how mother-child emotional reminiscing is affected by culture, gender, and the valence of the event. Thirty-one Euro-American and 30 Chinese middle-class mothers and their 3-year-old children discussed 1 highly positive and 1 highly negative experience. Mothers and children in both cultures used a greater variety of negative emotion words than positive emotion words and were more likely to confirm a shared emotional perspective when discussing the positive event but to negotiate emotion when discussing the negative event. Moreover, Chinese dyads used more negative emotion words overall than did Euro-American dyads but Euro-American dyads engaged in more negotiations of emotion than did Chinese dyads. Surprisingly, there were no effects of gender. Implications of these findings for emotional socialization are discussed.