Emotion Socialization and Children's Behavioral Problems in China and the United States 1

INTRODUCTIONThere is considerable research highlighting a link between parenting practices and children's externalizing and internalizing behavior problems. In general, harsh, coercive, and authoritarian parenting is positively associated with children's aggression and externalizing behaviors for North American and Chinese children (e.g., Chang, Lansford, Schwartz, & Farver, 2004; Chen, Wang, Chen, & Liu, 2002). Recently, there has been greater focus on the role of parents' emotion socialization practices (ESP) for either promoting or undermining their children's abilities to regulate emotions. Cultural differences between U.S. and Chinese parents with respect to emotional expression suggest that Chinese parents may minimize their children's emotional expression whereas U.S. parents may actually encourage children's emotional expressivity (Wang, Chen, Chen, Cui, & Li, 2006). Supportive (e.g., problem focused and emotion focused responding) and controlling (e.g., punitive responses and minimizing emotions) ESP were related to children's externalizing behaviors (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 2001). The goal of the current study was to examine cultural differences in mothers' and fathers' ESP across U.S. and Chinese families, and the role of mothers' and fathers' ESP in predicting children's behavior problems across cultural groups.Emotion socialization practices (ESP) have contributed to children's adjustment and social competence in a variety of ways, including modeling and teaching children ways to manage their experience and expression of emotion (Denham, Bassett, & Wyatt, 2007; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). Emotion socialization includes those parenting practices and behaviors that influence a child's learning regarding the experience, expression, and regulation of emotion and emotion-related behavior. These parental practices are expected to affect children's emotion-related functioning in a manner consistent with the socializes' beliefs, values, and goals regarding emotion and its expression.One salient dimension of ESP is how parents respond to their children's negative emotional displays. Parental reactions that are punitive or dismissing may impede children's ability to regulate physiological arousal and process information about emotional events (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Murphy, 1996). Punitive ESP may also result in children viewing emotions as threatening and lead them to avoid emotionally challenging situations, which might provide them with opportunities to learn about and cope with negative emotions (Eisenberg et al., 1998). In contrast, ESP that provide instrumental (e.g., problem-solving) or emotional (e.g., comforting) support are hypothesized to foster social and emotional competence through the child's openness to explore emotional events and meanings, their ability to regulate arousal, and to focus and shift attention to emotional stimuli in appropriate ways (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996).Cultural Differences in Parental Emotion SocializationEmotional expression is considered universal, but culture plays a large role in determining the emotional significance of events and the socially prescribed ways to communicate and act on these events. All children eventually acquire a set of socially prescribed rules of emotional conduct, yet cultures differ considerably with respect to expressive display rules (i.e., how one expresses emotion, for review, see Cole & Tan, 2007). Prior research has shown that Chinese children exhibit more negative emotionality (e.g., Ahadi, Rothbart, & Ye, 1993) and less sociability (Chen et al., 1998) than U.S. children. Porter et al. (2005) reported that U.S. parents rated their preschool children as more emotional than their Chinese counterparts.Values in Asian cultures emphasize the group over the individual and cooperation over competition. Empathy, harmony, and the subtle expression of emotion are valued in Eastern cultures, whereas Western cultures commonly value independence, assertiveness, selfactualization and the open expression of emotion. …